The night comes upon me, lifting its skin from the gray ocean and settling into my eyes, echoes of the hideaway time. As I stare from these windows across the tops of buildings, at the neon and brick, I hear seagulls cry out from their wandering darkness. It reminds me of the train, the ghost train that shuttled through my child’s mind. Like it, they are disembodied spirits that haunt the air, the mournful moan replaced with a wailing, staccato laughter.
It’s been a blur of a week. I spent most of it holed up in a hotel room to the north of the city, planning my daily attacks on the real estate of the mainland. I explained myself, my situation to countless landlords, inventing tales or retelling the truth, looking for the moment of synchronicity. At the brink of surrender, I received a call that awoke me from my sleep. It was a woman named Magic and her words, “This is Magic and I have an apartment for you”, roused me into the street and eventually into a lease.
And so, I shifted my belongings a fourth time, carrying the same boxes from place to place. I removed my friends from the cardboard crypts where they had been mummified for seven weeks, carefully peeling away the scraps of tissue and newspaper from around their bodies. I placed them on shelves, on tables, on bookcases – all familiar positions, and let them breathe and anchor again.
I began to explore the city from my location at the foot of the Space Needle and found my apartment to be perfectly situated, a dream studio in the buzzing heart of this city. I purchased cheap furniture and slowly moved from sleeping on the floor to existing in something that resembles what I remember of civilization. I began to play the parking game, finding a place on the street to leave my car, realizing that Seattle has three times the amount of people in it that it can sustain, and that they all drive.
In short, I began to move into city life, a life that I have never known and always wondered about. I also began to sniff out my territory like the wolf I am. As exciting as that might seem, what I feel mostly now is detachment. Perhaps it is just that I have no familiar anchor here other than myself, an anchor that I have not yet fully explored. I no longer have around me the things that I could rely on for thirty years.
I have realized lately that I am expecting my life here to be devoid of all I left behind me. I have envisioned a living situation that would give me more freedom and time to accomplish the things I need to do. I liked to look at the journey as a break from all that soul-sucking triviality. I fancied the drama over the surrender. I even convinced myself that I would never have to work again, that I would lead a romantic, free-spirited life that would only be filled with spirituality and art. In this, I chose a position of imbalance.
My passions and I are in a constant game. We run after each other in the meadows, outsmart each other, concede defeat, call truces from time to time in order to watch the clouds, and sweat with the exertion of a tight-grinned competition. We are perfect playmates in every sense of the word, enacting a game that is mutually agreed upon and that is played out without conditions or egos. My depressions as well as my ecstasies contribute to my fire, and strangely, that is what passion wants. It is all part of the game. It is not wrong to desire and dream about the things I expected, for that drives me to actually achieve them. It is wrong to not accept what is given when it is given gracefully, to insist on moving to point D when point B hasn’t been attained. It is wrong to question fate…
So, I sit here by my windows in a perfect apartment in a perfect city, surrounded by inspiration, energy and a thrumming, pounding vortex. It’s going to be my choice, whether to walk down a road that will bring me to the same place but in a different city, or whether to follow a different track, using certain common foundations. It is going to be my choice to realize that the fulfillment of a dream requires many small steps, and that this journey was a small step in a larger climb. This is only the first chapter in a very, very long book. Freedom is never easily won.
The ghost train took me in the night along a journey to the sea. Now it has grown wings and laughter.
But, all in all, it is only just another vessel to be filled with the soul of me…