The first time I went back to Seattle as an adult I was riding around with Ariel and Inga before a reading at some bookstore or other and I was overwhelmed with sadness to be back in the scene of so many youthful misadventures.
Inga offered sexual favors to cheer me up, but I just closed my eyes and said I don’t think that would help.
Ten years later, I can’t imagine that anything else would have, but hey – I know both more and less now, compared to when I was twenty-eight.
Eventually of course I moved to Seattle, because I wanted to win the tormented game I have always played with my past. For the most part, it worked – though I would sometimes find myself on particular roads and have to pull over because it was hard to drive while sobbing.
Various Seattle friends are privy to the information that I’ll be in the states this spring and keep asking if I will visit, and the answer is: I don’t know.
During my brief residence in that city I was responsible for two houses, two cars, and three young children. I was entrenched in an intricate and vast community stretching between Portland, Olympia, and Seattle, and the complications of an extended family six miles away across the Sound. There was too much work to deal with, too many invitations, too much noise. I had a whole lot to accomplish and only a little bit of time available.
Now I live on the other side of the world. I have a boat, a bicycle, and half-share in one adolescent boy. I have no discernible ambitions, aspirations, goals, plans for the future, or even interest in any of the concepts implied. I haven’t been on a stage in years.
One of my more maniacal friends, hearing these stories, just shrugs and says At least you got a book out of it. True, but possibly more significant than he might think.
I’ve changed. I’m not the sick kid dying in the cold public hospital, or the reckless teenager stripping and dancing around in the fountains at the Science Center. I’m not the resolute youngster who refused to go back, or the adult who felt she had conquered the world by purchasing a house on top of Beacon Hill.
Since leaving I have spent about a month of each year in the city. Stupid, shitty things have happened alongside the wondrous and weird; that is the nature of the place.
I feel that I should go back this spring, and that I want to, but that does not mean that I can. It might be healthier to go somewhere new, or at least, somewhere I am less likely to meet ghosts.