Home From Haiti

Haiti changed me. Being there—working in a field hospital and doing the best work of my life—changed me, altered my DNA, blurred the edges of everything I have ever known. I close my eyes here and there and think about my time there, think about everything I did, everything I saw, all the people living in a tent city just outside our makeshift hospital, and everything in my life seems like it’s spinning now that I’m home. Colors seem more rich, edges more blurred, images more granular.

Our team leaves Haiti on a chartered plane and there is applause when the wheels lift off the ground. We are given a sandwich with fresh bread and real mustard and Tillamook cheese with real wheat crackers and juice and soda, and there is silence while everyone eats ravenously and purposely. There are unspoken words, unspoken thankfulness that this isn’t pre-cooked food in a plastic pouch designed to survive the apocalypse. I ask for a soda, even though I haven’t had a soda in 12 years, but I want one for whatever reason I want one, and it is so very delicious. I drink it slowly, in sips not gulps, and I enjoy every ounce of sugar that hits the various sensory regions of my tongue. Then I fall quickly asleep and awaken before our wheels touch down in D.C., where applause rings throughout the cabin again.

We pile into a small room, all 100 or so of us, and we eat oranges and bananas and string cheese. I am too late to the meeting to get a banana, but there are plenty of oranges, and I peel mine quickly, salivating when juice squirts out of the orange and hits me in the face. I stand near Christine, offer her part of my orange, and she grabs it so quickly that it almost falls to the floor. Then someone else, someone whose name I don’t remember, runs toward us and reaches out his hand and Christine tears off a few slices from her half of the orange and he eats it so quickly that I wonder if he took time to chew.

We listen to the debriefing and talk about psychological issues, medical issues and logistics issues. We’ve seen a lot of things in Haiti that have touched nerves deep inside, and we have done things as medical professionals that we would never do in America, because we have hospitals here and sanitation and sterilization and all the right tools. We are all silent for awhile, not quite able to say anything because it is all a bit raw, and there is a moment of silence before the meeting is over and we can move on, move into the next moment of time.

After, I’m the first person to walk into the bar, order a beer and feel the cold bottle against the inside of both hands. They don’t have beer on tap, which is a little disconcerting, but I’ll take what I can get, and a cold beer regardless of name is all that I require in this moment. We drink, all of us, and cheer and clink glasses and laugh, and after a few beers we sit at tables with chairs and we eat fresh-cooked foods with flavor using actual silverware. This astonishes us, even though we have only been away from all of this for a mere two weeks.

Soon after, we eat steak and chicken and potatoes and zucchini and cheesecake, and then we go back to the bar and drink some more and eventually there are shots of liquor, which I don’t drink because I don’t drink hard alcohol or wine, and there are moments where people rib me and coerce me into drinking a shot, but I don’t succumb to the drinking of shots because I only drink beer—and I only drink light beers such as lagers and pilsners. After awhile, after the shots have gone down the hatch and people have gone to bed, Jessica and I are still standing in the bar as everything gets shut down and chairs are put onto tabletops. We have closed the bar, which is not terribly unusual for me, but it also makes sense tonight because Jessica and I have been working the night shift for the past two weeks, so we are not ready for bed, not by a long shot, so we stay awake and drink and talk and laugh and cry and hug and try to make sense of the crazy journey we just experienced. After, once the tears have mostly dried, we go to our rooms and change out of our uniforms and into our street clothes, hail a cab at 04:30 and find our way to the airport for our 06:30 flights.

When I land in Seattle I grin, slightly, because I get to take the light rail home. This is the third time I’ve been on the light rail, and the first time I’ve been on the light rail since it extended to the airport. It’s less than a mile from the light rail station to my house, and I huff my gear home all the while I’m mindful that I’m not quite stable in my shoes, not quite able to find balance no matter how hard I shift my weight or position my hips. I walk at my usual pace, a bit blurry inside my head, a bit in disbelief that I’m home, that I can take a shower every day and wash my hair, that I can flush the toilet, that I can eat something that doesn’t come in a box, that I can sleep in a bed without mosquito netting, that I can sleep with a soft pillow and wake up when my body feels it’s time to wake up. I have to train my body, too, to sleep at night and wake during the day, because I spent the last two weeks working the night shift at our makeshift hospital, which is to say that I have been working from 07:00 to 19:00.

I push through the door of my house, drop the heaviest pack on the floor and gently place the other backpack nearby. It has artwork and statues and objects that I bought from people in Haiti, and I don’t want them to break. I have transported them safely this far, and I look forward to putting them on my bookshelf, in my bedroom, in the kitchen. I kick off my work boots, push them to the side, slide into my Converse and head out to eat. I need two things: beer and a salad. Climbing into my car feels weird, unusual, and listening to music feels even weirder. I start to get that feeling, the one where I crave solitude, and I sink into my aloneness with fervor.

I make my way to my second favorite pub because there will be less people there, and because the seating arrangement will make it easier for me to sit alone, because I am not at all interested in conversation or human interaction. I simply want to sit and eat and drink. I like the simplicity of this. Crave it, really. Save for the moments in the bathroom, I have spent the last two weeks around people, engaged in conversation, engaged in interaction, engaged in emotion. It is nice, really, to not have to engage, to not have to feel like I need to protect my heart. People in medicine do this, because we have to, because it is necessary. We learn how to detach or otherwise not become attached because it is easier this way, much easier.

To be honest, though, I got attached when I was in Haiti. I got very attached, and I’m not really sure how to deal with all of that now that I’m home, now that I’m physically detached from the people I became attached with, and this is all very new and very weird to me.

My skin itches sometimes. I have red bite marks on my hands, my arms, my legs, my lower back, my neck, my face—attacked by fleas while I slept in my bunk on the last night I would spend at our field hospital. Most of them don’t itch, but I absentmindedly scratch simply because the red splotches look like they should itch. I have bug bites and hives and rashes—a hodgepodge of epidermal oddities from medications and allergic reactions to medications and bugs and overall toxicity to things I have ingested and inhaled. Since I started my journey to Haiti I have taken three different anti malarial medications, steroids, antihistamines, and antibiotics. In a few months I need to get various medical tests to ensure that I don’t have some medical malady after everything I was exposed to in Haiti. Prior to departure, I had five vaccines (boosters for Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B, Tetanus, Typhoid, MMR) stabbed into both arms, both of which became sore and felt like someone punched me in the deltoid with brass knuckles.

I don’t have to go back to work for another week, and I need this week to unwind and decompress. I need to reconnect with my life here, need to figure out how to leave aspects of my old life behind, need to add all the newness of Haiti into a new life. A bunch of us talked about this in Haiti, and we are aware that coming home is going to be hard. Hard in that sense of seeing people who complain simply because they have a voice; of seeing people who feel they are entitled to everything simply because they have a pulse; of seeing people who feel they are the center of the world simply because they have walked into a room; of seeing people who feel like they are stuck when they have half a dozen choices to make. When I get home, when I sit at the bar of my favorite pub, I see this and I cringe and I think to myself: How can I be different now? How can I let go? How can I find more compassion?

I don’t tell many people that I’m home. I don’t call anyone when I land. I go home, take care of myself, try to figure out what I need, what I want in this life of mine. I think about what’s next, what matters to me, how I need to take the next steps in this journey of my very awesome life. I think about what aspects of my shell that I’ll let melt onto the sidewalk behind me and what aspects of my new shell that I’ll keep gluing together from my time in Haiti. Mostly I am learning how to walk again, how to position my body with each step so that it feels good and smooth and purposeful.

I go to my favorite pub and eat salad and drink beer and read a magazine. I get messages and phone calls and find out that I’m the only person on our team to make it home, that the rest of my team is sitting in D.C. or Newark, stuck in a snowstorm making snow angels outside their respective hotels. I think about this for a while, think about how I would be happy to be stuck in D.C., and yet I am also happy to be home in my own bed with my own pillow and my favorite beer.

I’m home now, and I get this, and I understand this, but it feels weird and almost awkward and almost not right. Working at a field hospital in Haiti awakened something inside of me, and I’m not quite sure how to move forward with this newness, but it starts to make sense when I sit at the pub and look around at people and talk to strangers and engage in conversation that matters.

Haiti changed me. And I am thankful and grateful for this moment in which I become aware of how Haiti has changed me. And I smile, and I take steps forward, and I try to figure out how to stand again, how to find balance again—and I laugh when things seem wobbly and otherwise not-right, and I step forward with my usual steadfast stance.

Back Home

I get home from Haiti, sleep and rest and find my way to my favorite pub so I can drink my favorite beer. It is warm outside, and while I sit at the bar reading my magazine and drinking my Pilsner, I see a man walk through the door wearing a leather motorcycle jacket and carrying his helmet. Everything inside my head stops for a few quick seconds, and I think to myself: it’s time now, time to ride, time to get back on two wheels and open the throttle and become ever-so-aware of my own mortality.

I’m not sure how to be, now that I’m home. Everything inside my head is different, changed, altered in some blurry sort of way. I’m happy to be home, glad on so many levels, and yet there is some part of me that isn’t here right now, and I’m not sure that part of me is ever going to return.

I’m ok with that. Ok with all of this. I have spent two weeks of my life doing the best work of my life, and now that I’m home I think about how I can keep doing this, keep doing the best work of my life. I write things down, think about things, put things into motion and take steps forward.

I knew this would happen, knew this would happen a long time ago – knew that I would find the work that matters to me. I smile, more now, and I take steps toward doing more amazing work.

At home, sitting inside the plush-ness of walls and running water and electricity, I drink beer and look outside and see a tree that is sprouting buds. I think about how it is February and not time for this, and I am reminded of Jefferson and how he defied the best of medical diagnosis and went home with his mother after five days of anticipated death.

Life is awesome and funny and odd. I am thankful—almost always—for my life, and now that I’m home from Haiti, I am even more thankful for this very delightful life of mine.

So Incredibly Awesome

I go to the pub, often, because I like going to the pub. Because I like Pilsner, and I like my bartenders, and I like reading my magazines, and I like these minutes of Me-ness. And, also, I like the game that one of my brewer pals and I play which involves being teenage boys and trying to scare the shit out of each other. Today I tried twice and failed. I had, I suppose, the perfect opportunity where he was busy in the back hosing down the floor, and I snuck through the brewery, slipped through the door and shouted “BOO!” all the while I was laughing. He didn’t flinch, not at all. Instead, he turned around, looked at me and laughed. We hug, and I leave, and the game continues.

Today I find myself sitting at the far end of the bar, where there are not a lot of people, and I can read my magazine and drink my beer and eat my steak tacos with little interruption or social interaction save for the juvenile banter my bartender and I throw back and forth. He is doing what he calls “around the world” where he is drinking a shot glass full of all the beers they have on tap, which amounts to a total of 16 beers, which amounts to a certain number of pints that I cannot remember.

I monitor his progress, and I comment, often, on his inability to get out of the Americas, out of North America. And finally, he hits China or Russia or India and this provides me with endless moments of entertainment. Later, people start talking to me, and I can tell they want to engage in an actual conversation versus passing commentary, and this is ok with me, sometimes, because I am fully aware of the idea that people don’t sit at the bar because they want to be alone—except for me.

Later, after I’ve eaten my tacos and talked to various people about life and home and design and relationships, I grab my growler from the backseat of my truck and stroll, casually, back into the pub. This is when I happen to notice a woman staring at me and very obviously talking to her friend about me. They are talking, I find out later, about the growler I have in my hands. And so I sit with them and we drink beer and laugh and talk and learn and discover, and when they leave, after they’ve hugged me goodbye, I smile and grin and understand just how awesome life is when you are able to stand open and engage in all the brilliance that life dishes up.

My growler, for whatever reason, is full of CO2 and it’s leaking beer onto the table and slowly dripping onto the seat next to me no matter how tight I twist the lid. This is funny to me, and to the women I am sitting with, and to the wait-staff and to the bartender. We laugh, all of us, and napkins are produced and cleaning takes place and later my growler still spills onto the table and I grin from ear to ear because this is too fucking funny.

At home, later, I talk to an old friend by way of text messaging, and I smile and I grin and I laugh. I knew her, way back in college, way back when I was a dumb-ass twenty-year-old who was just starting the never-ending-process of trying to figure out this awesomeness know as my life. There is forgiving and forgetting and moving forward and connection and that feeling like you’re coming home. And I think to myself: this life of mine, this crazy weird life of mine, is so fucking incredibly awesome.

And I am so incredibly thankful.

Un-ending Hope

When I wake up in the morning, feel that random pause inside my chest, I smile and feel for the skipped beat with the tips of my fingers. It is, indeed, palpable this morning, but there is nothing to do about that, so I climb out of bed and shower and dress and spill myself into the rainy and gray-skied morning. It is awesome, really, to be so very aware of how my heart is beating, to feel the pressure of each beat against the tips of my fingers, to not take for granted the awesomeness of my heart.

Today my friends (baristas and bartenders) are buying me free drinks, and while I have supposedly given up coffee, I find myself enjoying a delightful americano and taking note of the fact that my heart is beating faster after a few sips, which is making the random pause a little more pronounced—enough so that I sometimes press the palm of my hand over my sternum and absentmindedly hold my breath.

I am on a stretch of ten days off, because that’s how super awesome my life is. I am exploring new places to eat, new places to drink, new places to relax and observe the world around me. Today I’m in a coffee house in a rapidly-changing part of town where the condo boom is still booming and where my barista friend is slipping me free americanos. It feels, finally, like winter in Seattle with the gray and the rain and the oft-seen Gore-Tex jackets sliding past the window through which I am viewing the cold and wet world outside.

Yesterday, when I got home from work, I went shopping and bought a bunch of gear to take with me to Haiti. I am probably going to be deployed there within the next two weeks because I am one of several amazing people on a disaster medical team. After, I stopped in a coffee house where my barista friend was working and drank espresso and read news on my iPhone and donated $10 to the American Red Cross by way of a text message. Today I read CNN and find out that more than $8 million dollars has been raised this way, and I think: We are a super awesome people!

And we have what I think is a super awesome president, who has been a super awesome president for almost a year now.

After my first espresso is gone, my friend slides me another one, and when I check my heart, the pause is gone—or simply un-palpable in this particular moment—and I take slow sips and savor the deliciousness of this little cup of goodness. Later, in just a few hours, I will spill myself onto the raining concrete outside and find my way to the pub where my bartender will buy me free drinks—because I am super awesome that way.

Quotable

From an article in the New Yorker about a man who builds stoves:

“The optimist thinks the glass is half full. the pessimist thinks the glass is half empty. The engineer knows the truth: that the glass is twice as large as it should be for optimum utilization of resources.”

The Beat and The Pause In-between

Sitting on the table, dressed in a hospital gown, I can feel the coldness of the room against my skin, which is already cold because it is winter and I have walked through the rain to the doctor’s office. So I curl my arms around my torso, massage the outer parts of my arms and shiver just enough to warm my body a degree or two. The room is cold, like a doctor’s office almost always is, and I leave my socks on because my feet are always cold, and I hate the feeling of having cold toes.

The doctor walks into the room, and I recognize her from the last time I was in her office, but she is not My Doctor. She is not My Doctor because my health insurance changed and I cannot see My Doctor unless I want to pay a lot of money to go “out of network.” So I visit My New Doctor, and she has changed her last name because she has gotten married since the last time I saw her, and I tell her I am here for my yearly checkup and to get new prescriptions for asthma medications.

But as long as I’m here, I tell her that My Doctor and Another Doctor—which is to say two out of three doctors—have told me that I have a heart murmur. I tell her, too, that I want to know if I actually have a heart murmur, and I tell her that she must listen to my heart for at least 60 seconds, because that’s how long I remember that My Doctor listened to my heart and told me that I do, indeed, have a heart murmur. She smiles when I tell her this because she knows that I am a paramedic, but I tell her that I have absolutely no experience in detecting a heart murmur.

She humors me, I think, and listens to my heart for at least 60 seconds. Then we talk about what she’s heard or not heard, and we discuss what this means or doesn’t mean. Later, when I leave her office, I am satisfied and yet not satisfied—I have no answers either way, and now the statistics are two who have heard a murmur and two who have not heard a murmur.

My work partner and I climb into the ambulance and drive to a coffee shop to meet another crew that’s on duty. I slide into a seat in a comfortable chair near the fire. It is a fake fire, but it sinks into my skin and warms me after the cold air outside has left me slightly shivering. I am too warm after a few seconds of sitting in the comfortable chair because I am dressed in too many layers—the number of layers that would keep me warm if I were outside in freezing temperatures for dozens upon dozens of minutes.

My coworkers talk idly and softly at first because the coffee house is not that busy. But soon the sounds gets louder as more customers walk through door and everyone needs to talk a little louder just to be heard. I zone them out, which I usually do, and read the newspaper (a newspaper printed on actual paper) and occasionally I read McSweeney’s or the New York Times on my iPhone. I am not a social person—have almost never been a social person—but I have learned skills that taught me how to interact in social situations so that it is not so terribly awkward.

I listen, occasionally, to what two of my coworkers are saying, and only because I am trying to act as if I am being social. Inside my chest and in the back of my throat, however, I can feel some type of flutter or pause. I call it that because I don’t know what else to call it, but I have been feeling this flutter/pause for some time now. It does not feel as if my heart is beating too fast, or too slow—instead if feels like a moment where my heart has forgotten that it belongs inside my chest. It happens here and there, usually in the morning when I’ve woken up, or at night when I’m reading a book and getting ready to close my eyes and sink into a hopeful sleep.

So I do what I always do when I feel this pause/flutter—I press two or three fingers of my right hand into the groove at the side of my neck. Sometimes, depending on how my fingers feel, I switch hands. I know how to find my pulse, know how to find it almost as quickly as my fingers touch my skin. Until this morning, however, my pulse has always felt regular in all the aspects that make a heartbeat regular when you palpate them with the tips of your fingers. Each time I have palpated my pulse when I feel that flutter/pause, it has felt totally normal.

But today was different. Today I could feel that my heart was skipping a beat each time I felt the pause/flutter inside my chest. This went on for 15 minutes or so, and it was happening in a rhythmical way that led me down a path of curiosity. I counted each time my heart pulsated and it was fairly normal save for the hiccup: beat, beat, beat, beat, beat, pause, beat, beat, beat, beat, beat, pause. When I walked out into the cold air, walked toward my ambulance, I could feel the flutter/pause happening every so often now, outside the one-every-six-beats pattern. Back at our station, after we pulled the ambulance into the bay, I wired myself to a heart monitor. I suppose this is one of the benefits of being a paramedic: free access to a heart monitor and minimal knowledge of how to interpret the results.

My heart was skipping a beat every five beats, until it decided it would skip a beat every six or seven or eight or nine beats. I printed this out to show My Various Doctors just incase they decided to question me or say that this was a figment of my imagination. After a while, the arrhythmia resolved and I could no longer feel the flutter/pause inside my chest, and it no longer appeared on my EKG. But I did a 12-lead EKG (a view of my heart at multiple angles) just because I could, but more importantly I know what to look for in terms of what is happening with someone’s heart.

Early in the morning, right around 03:00, my partner and I are woken up because someone has been involved in a snowmobile accident. I talk with my patient for about an hour, which is about how long it takes to get him from where he has had his accident to the closest hospital. He is, as it turns out, my age, and he is involved in the banking industry. We talk about many things—because we have almost 60 minutes to talk all the while I remain cognizant that he may have broken his femur—and I find out what he does for a living, how long he’s been married, how many kids he has, what kind of motorcycle he rides, and what has value in his life.

He asks how long I’ve been doing this paramedic thing, and I divulge little nuggets of information about my life: how long I’ve been a paramedic, what kind of motorcycle I ride, how I live my life in terms of being constantly aware that my life is one step shy of ending. He tells me, a fist slightly clenched, that many people aren’t seeing the larger picture: It’s not money we have, but time. And time, we both agree, is worth more than its weight in gold—no matter how you measure time or weight or value or substance.

We talk for a while longer, laugh here and there, and I realize that I’m connecting with someone on that level that I rarely connect with people. When I leave him at the hospital, I walk toward him with an outstretched hand to say goodbye, and he wraps my small hand in both of his large hands and thanks me in a way that his grip has weight, has value, has meaning. I smile, and he smiles, and we say goodbye.

I walk away remembering our conversation, remembering that the time we have here on this planet is worth more than anything attached to a dollar sign. And I reflect and wonder and question whether or not I am living my life like it is worth more than its weight in gold. But reflecting and wondering and questioning about Then doesn’t matter so much as the Now—and so I am reminded, again, of the brilliance of my life and how I am living it right now. And I do, indeed, live my life rather brilliantly, all the while knowing that there is more unknown brilliance to experience.

And I live it too, with an awareness of the inevitable end, and every time I flip the ignition on my motorcycle I think about this inevitable end … and this is when I inhale a little deeper, pull the throttle back a little more, and spend a few more minutes burning the outer layer of my shell in a fire so I can peel back another layer and live a little more richer—especially since I know there is a random pause in my heart’s beat.

Into The Next Space

When I step into his apartment, I am walking backwards, struggling to pull the bottom end of a refrigerator through the door. There is the delicious and spicy smell of something cooking somewhere in a room I can’t see yet, and he tells me that his girlfriend has a pork pozole simmering in their slow cooker. I pause for a moment, try to grip the bottom of the fridge a little tighter and deeply inhale—it is, indeed, delicious as he has already said.

Waylon is almost 30, has a dark shaggy beard with similar shaggy hair and sometimes when I see him at the pub he looks like he’s about to wander off into the wilderness with a bag of rice and a dream in search of a bus he doesn’t know he will eventually find. It is fun to watch him as we climb the stairs because he cannot stop grinning from ear to ear. He makes his own beer and now he’s about to have something that he’s wanted to build for several years now, only this one is free and comes with all the required parts.

We climb three flights of stairs carrying a kegerator—my now-old kegerator—and I am almost spent when we get to his front door, but the smell of the pozole helps to push me through the door, into the living room, onto the deck where the kegerator will find its new home. I am giving it away because I am trying to rid my life of as many possessions as possible, because I think that I am tired of living like a teenage boy, because I am tired of possessions that require maintenance, because I am getter closer to shaking up my life in a way that will alter my geography and possibly my profession.

Later, when I get home and walk into the space where my kegerator used to be, I can breathe a little easier, and I can breathe more deeply because there is more room, more space. And it feels good in some unknown place beneath layers of weathered skin because now there are less things weighing me down, less things attached to my shell. I want my life to be more fluid. Crave it, really, like a hunger for air. Getting rid of things makes me feel light, like I can float, like I can hover somewhere above the ground and beneath the clouds.

I have—for several years now—been giving away my possessions. I have been giving more of them away in the past year because I have become aware of how many things I no longer want or need. I give things away to friends, to strangers, to acquaintances, to charities. I have been giving things away that have always had value to me but no longer seem to matter: kegerator, movies, music, books, gear, electronic equipment. And my friends, they have been a little concerned, they want to know if I’m ok, if everything is all right, if I am having dark or otherwise morbid thoughts. I laugh at this, laugh because I would not rob even one second from my very delightful life, but I appreciate that they ask, appreciate that I have people in my life who would ask such a thing.

Giving things away—at least for me—is easy. I am not attached, not in any deep or meaningful way to most of what I own, but I have not always been this way. I could, I know, watch everything burn into a bright red intensity and simply walk away without wanting or needing to replace most of what melted into the flame. There is one thing though, the one thing that has always been consistent in my needs, my wants, my desires: my motorcycle.

So I keep giving things away, moving objects from here into some other space that has nothing to do with me. I give things to Goodwill, to friends, to strangers. And this feels good, so good, that I grin each time something leaves my hands and gently falls into the hands of another. The kegerator is just the beginning of me getting rid of larger possessions, larger things that no longer have value in my life. I smile when I think about this, smile when I find someone who wants something that I have—and I deliver it to them as a way of saying “thanks for taking this off my hands.”

And so I sit at my favorite bar, drink my favorite beer, read one of my favorite authors, and savor this feeling of lightness, of being unattached, of moving into the next space.

Tearing In Half

Lately, I’ve been exploring the nooks and crannies of my city, wandering the streets along with the tourists, pretending, too, that I am a tourist with my backpack and my camera and my curious way of looking at almost everything. My clothes, I think, give me away; I have been wearing—now that it is colder and rainier—what I call Pacific Northwest clothing, which involves all things synthetic and low-top hiking boots masquerading as sneakers.

I decided—last month or so—that it’s time to change, time to move, time to leave. So I’m taking the necessary steps to move forward, into a new city, into a new life, which won’t likely happen for another year and a bit, but I grin each time I think about this, each time I think about the way my body feels when I remember exploring the brick and steel and concrete of this city in which I am going to implant my life. So this leaving—this leaving that I am always doing in every aspect of my life—is forcing me to explore my own city even more.

Today I go to the museum, even though it’s the weekend and I typically don’t do things like this on the weekends because there are too many people, too many cars, too many lines. But there is an exhibit I want to see, and I happen to have today off work, so I ride there on my scooter even though it is cold, but it is not too cold, and, more importantly, it is not raining. I love rain, love it in the way that I love drinking water, but I don’t particularly like riding a motorized vehicle around in the cold air and the cool rain—because my knees hurt when raindrops slam into them at 35+ miles an hour. For the record, it is like having three inch nails repeatedly driven into your knee caps.

I don’t know much about Michelangelo, save for the obvious things that most people know, but I explore images that the Seattle Art Museum says the artist has “not approved of this image.” I laugh when I read this tag line, laugh even more when I see it on posters at the museum. I love things like this, love the creativity behind the people behind the masks behind the pens behind the paper.

Later, I spill myself onto the street and wander toward an architecture store where I touch things and read things and meander my way through books and objects and containers. I have a thing for containers: houses, boxes, books, papers, bread, wood, metal, skin; because the structure—its outline—is beautiful to me. Inside this outer shell there is another container encasing other container encasing other container; and I am reminded of how this circle of encasement is never-ending.

When I was in grade-school, my teacher gave us a sheet of paper and instructed us to tear it into halves. There was nothing special about this piece of paper, nothing magical. We tore and tore and tore, and when we got down to something our tiny and nimble fingers could no longer tear in half, she told us what would happen. She said we would need tinier and tinier “hands” to tear the pieces. And I wondered, then, how small a thing needed to be before it was no longer able to be torn into halves. This thought has never left me. Ever.

And so I sit at a bar, drink delicious pints of beer, and think about how many times I have torn my life in half—torn it into pieces and torn it into pieces again. And I think that it is not possible to tear it in half again, yet I can hear that tearing sound like a low-level hum … and this sound makes me smile while I start to move my life into a new direction.

Moving Into

When I step outside it seems too warm, too sunny, and I get a slightly unsettled feeling as I start out on my run because this warmth and this sun are terribly unusual for this time of year. I live near a popular bike path, so it is easy to run without having to worry about cars and lights and things that might force me to focus on my personal safety. So I am able to focus on my breath, on the speed and sound of each breath, and I run until my asthma says my lungs have had enough of all this running on this particular day.

I run, simply, because I need my blood and my body to move in a way that it doesn’t move when I am standing still—because I am not good at this, not good at being still, not good at staying in one place too long. I have been here in Seattle—a city that I love dearly—for some 10 years now, and I have lived in this house that I own for at least seven of those 10 years. Save for growing up in Chicago, I have never lived in any city for more than five years, and I have a penchant for moving apartments every one to two years. But I bought a place, bought this place, and for the past seven years it has been “basecamp”—only I have never ventured off on a long-enough journey and returned home to snuggle back into my comfortable bed.

I had, for many years, moved every year or so because I could not stay, could not plant roots, could not seem to attach myself to much of anything. I am still this way, still mostly unattached, still mostly un-attachable. I don’t know how to stay, don’t know how to … I just don’t know how to stay. I move—though the more accurate word might be “leave”—because it cleanses my life, rids me of possessions, detaches me of things.

Every year at this time—this time being October slash November—I get the urge to leave my life. Part of me wants to fall asleep and wake up in another country with another identity. Another part of me wants to wander somewhere, anywhere, so long as I was am always moving forward, never staying anywhere long enough to learn the names of streets well enough that I could draw a map of how to get from Point A to Point B. Another part of me wants to go somewhere, briefly, walk the streets and discover a city’s hum, stumble across bars with empty stools and beers on tap.

This year I do it. I feed that urge, feed that wanderlust, and go somewhere, briefly, and do all of the things I want to do: walk, discover and stumble. And that delightful feeling I get when I engage in my life—that feeling that soaks into my skin with each step and each breath—goes deep. And when I return home, return to “basecamp,” I know that I’m about to shake up my life.

I have been avoiding a specific city for years, probably a good 12 years to be more accurate, because the simple mention of this city has stirred something inside my atrium, stirred the blood rushing through my arteries. It is a bit like a low-level hum that is always there, almost undetectable with all the white noise of my daily life. When I stop, though, when I stop and watch the leaves rustle, watch the rain fall, listen to the sound of water crashing onto shore, I can hear that low-level hum and the power of its echo inside my ears.

Later in the day—after my run, when it is mid-afternoon—the light changes and becomes a darker version of gray. The temperature cools and by the time I walk through my front door, that unsettled feeling I started my run with seems to have numbed a little, but I know it will return, and I know it will return with an edgier intensity.

It is time, I know—soon, really—to scratch the itch and move my body and my blood, to start the next geographical journey. But first I need to explore here more. I need to wander and discover and stumble across the streets of Seattle—and I have been doing this for days now, and each time I return home, I get that unsettled feeling, only this time it lingers, and has yet to leave, yet to turn gray, yet to cool, yet to numb.

The Sky’s Arrhythmia

I wake, often, in the middle of the night, unable to go back to sleep until it is morning and most people are on their way to work. I lie in bed and listen to the sounds of other peoples’ days unfolding outside my window, and I wonder how much sleep they get, how rested they feel when they climb out of bed each day. And I wait, too, for my body to fall back asleep, which it does, eventually. I awaken later—but not enough later that my body feels rested—to the sound of rain that sounds different today, less resonant, maybe, as it trickles through the gutters.

I wander into my day wearing my not-waterproof jacket, jeans and sneakers. Rain pours from the sky in random bursts and soaks through my jacket to the shirt underneath. I’m still wearing a t-shirt even though it’s the middle of October, but I’m wearing a long-sleeve shirt underneath for added warmth. My jeans are an inch too long so they slide along the ground at the heel of my sneakers and soak up water as I walk through puddles. I step through the door at the pub and my favorite waitress is standing there smiling, waiting for a hug. She reaches for me as I shake water off like a dog, a bit cartoon-ish, really, and she laughs, smiles wide, and reaches her arms inside my jacket to keep dry, wraps them all the way around my back and squeezes tight.

I slide into my seat at the bar, my hair dripping wet, my legs and arms cold from the wet clothes. Various people walk past, touch me lightly on the shoulder, smile and say hello. I come here a lot, usually when there are less people, but it is the weekend and it is pumpkin beer season so the bar fills quickly and this mildly annoys me. I don’t go to the pub to be social—though I do find the occasionally witty but usually juvenile conversations with my bartender rather entertaining—I go there because it is My time: away from work, away from home, away from friends, away from people who are close to me. I go there to drink beer, read books and magazines, write in my notebook, eat lunch, regroup.

People often ask what I do with my time off, and when the person sitting next to me asks, I tell him the same answer I give when people ask what I do: “Goof off!”

I like this life of mine. Love it, really. I have, I know, a very delightful life. I am rarely ever sad, rarely ever depressed, rarely ever unsatisfied with the choices I’ve made that led me here. I live, for the most part, very simply, and I typically stay away from people and things that don’t add value to my life.

When I look out the window, look out into the sky, I can see bursts of heavy rain, like a pulse letting me know the sky is alive with its irregular rhythm … with its arrhythmia—and I smile as I push myself out into the now-late afternoon and find my way home to goof off some more.