The evening rises up from the gray ocean and settles 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 childhood. Like it, they are disembodied spirits that haunt the air, the mournful moan replaced by a wailing, staccato laughter.
I feel I am a little voice in a big wind, hardly noticeable in my ministrations – a tiny flame flickering on a hillside of delights and conscious, a whisper spoken upon a land of noise and shadow. I am that fish, the same enterprising fish that swam from ocean to ocean, tired, worldly, confused, now swimming through the rains of a Northwest winter night and finding that water is water.
I reached Seattle last Tuesday afternoon, under the auspiciousness of a double rainbow. The car was unpacked and the items put into storage, including the fabled car-top carrier, which against all odds and sometimes against all wishes lasted the duration. Upon arrival, I immediately entered into serious apartment hunting mode, which included a trip to Bainbridge Island and Port Townsend on the too-expensive-for-me ferry system. I also had the car repaired to the tune of a ridiculous sum of money that I don’t have, but somehow found.
As I go through a semblance of a more normal life, the fear is a frequent companion – the uncertainty that has been instilled in me from a lifetime of comfort and ease. I sometimes feel myself tenaciously clinging to the cliffside of where I am, digging my nails into the rock while the wind and the rain rips at me.
Alone, the rite of passage weighs on me. I have no clue as to how I am going to support myself. I am completely displaced here to an almost amusing extreme. And since I don’t know anyone, I really have nobody but myself to rely on to figure this mess out. However, the gifts I have received in the journey itself makes me hopeful that the way will become clear.
I spent the first week of my Seattle arrival 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.
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 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.
And that’s where I am now. 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. It is going to be my work to accept that the fulfillment of a dream requires many small steps, and that this journey was a small grasshopper leap in a larger climb.
But, no more do I wonder if this was the right choice. I know it was and will continue to be. This is only the first chapter in a very, very long book.
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.