Field Report

The other night I was barrelling down the city streets driving someone’s van, blasting The Cars like nobody’s business. My friend Melissa turned to me and said, I mean, I don’t have to explain, right, you just get how good this is, right? And I did. The Cars, the lights and darkness, taking wrong turns through burger king parking lots. It was a city night, and anything was possible. A bunch of us sat in an all night pancake restaurant and listened to soul music on the jukebox. We ate waffles.

The next night Ariana and I took a walk in the fruit packing district. We wanted to go to a gallery opening that we knew would be over by the time we got there. We walked anyway, and by the time we got there, the whole street was so empty Ariana couldn’t help but mention the fact that we were two girls on a very inadvisable stretch of road. As we headed toward home, it started pouring. Later, we refered to it as our walk up the mountain. Another face of living in a city.

I make my mountains out of rainy late night streets, and I ground myself in the security of my friends. Sometimes it feels like that’s all I have here. The bravado of newness has worn off, and it’s my challenge to take the risk of extending myself out into the empty space of a city where there are insanely rich people, and awkwardly famous people, and people who I will never, ever know.

You know how in Olympia you break up with your boyfriend and cry your head off in the balcony at the Capitol Theater, and you have the allot at least an extra half hour at the coop just to talk to people? You wear your workout clothes stumbling down the street on your way to the gym, and the boy who always gives you the eye at Darby’s smiles anyway, and that’s just the way it is. Everybody knows everybody’s business, and sometimes it just makes you want to disappear. But that same thing looks out for you, too. If there’s some person you’re a little interested in, you know their story. And if you don’t know it, guaranteed you know five people who do. If you need a job, you’ll have way better luck running into someone at the coop than you ever will by looking in the newspaper.

I’ve lived in towns all my life, and I’ve been sheltered and held in check by the entire web of the community. Now I live in a city where I can just go the store, and buy some food, and maybe I’ll see one person I know. It’s a novelty for me to simply buy my groceries, no conversations attached. But sometimes it gets hard to remember who I am, since there’s so few people around to remind me of what my own life’s been made of.

Hey, you guys, here I am! I exist, right?

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 11th, 2006 at 6:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.