I grew up in Massachusetts. I was born in the 80s, which makes me a child of the 90s. When a general consensus was reached that I was no longer a child I went off to school in Minnesota.
Minnesota was a place of extremes.
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I sometimes write stories (short ones and longer ones). I often make the cars in my stories Toyota Corollas rather than Toyota Tercels because: Corolla is a funnier word that Tercel.
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I’m not sure I believe that, especially if I pronounce Tercel with a hard C so it sounds like “Turkle.”
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When we crossed the border between Pennsylvania and Ohio - after the longest straightest four hours driving of my life – I was trembling as I walked. I could barely stand. I stared at the bottles lining the gas station walls and wondered silently why they sold so much liquor if they didn’t want people to drink and drive. Then I made a broad judgment about everyone in Pennsylvania – or at least that part of Pennsylvania – and found out I was right years later. When you took over you told me – fucking ordered me really – to sleep and I did it because what the fuck else was I going to do – stay awake just to spite you? You didn’t mention a god damn thing to me but when I woke up in the midst of traffic – stretching for miles and miles on end through dying coal country drifting into autumn early in the most beautiful way possible – you barely spoke to me – just asked me to pick the music. After I made my choice you told me to pick something else - then told me to pick something else again and again until it finally worked out.
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A cycle. A broken circle. A mustache that keeps growing back no matter how many times you cut it off.
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This might seem like an indictment of you, or perhaps your memory. The things your memory is responsible for. It might be, at that.
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I took my first flight on a plane when I was two years old, long before I ever drove. My dad had to work in the Cascades in California, so I was placed in a sling and carried into the foothills and, on one particularly amazing day, to the peak of Shastina, Shasta’s little sister. I don’t remember any of this. I know it only from the stories my parents have told me.
When I see the pictures, I wonder if they are of someone else, some other child or infant, tucked into a baby-ready backpack and carried up hills and mountains and into the dry veins of dying volcanos. I understand that these images are of me, and yet I feel no attachment to them, no association.
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The first night you spent in my hometown you coasted the car along hillsides on fumes – brought it in just below E – and then went to bed after I cooked you a veggie burger in a frying pan. You ate it without a bun – clasped between your bare hands – bite by bite – cheeks puffing out to blow the heat of each piece of processed vegetable and legume matter out. You ate it wrapped in a paper towel – and you didn’t smile once which was weird because it was so cute – it seemed like the joy you radiated out into the world should start with you after all. My mom took an instant dislike to you before then but I think that if you ever could’ve won her back it would’ve been that night.
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I was a child of the 90s, born in Massachusetts, in the 80s. I’m still not sure how that works. After I went to school in Minnesota, I moved back home, broken and battered, largely by you. Things didn’t improve for me there, so I packed up my car, the car named Jenny, and drove across the country to my friend Corey’s house. Corey lived in Portland, Oregon.
Portland was a place of extreme moderation.
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When you left I was struck not by the devastation you left in your wake, but how ordinary things were again, how the devastation was really just what marked your presence. I sat there on my bed for five minutes, collected myself, then walked out of my apartment, to my car, and drove to kickball. I was in a kickball league at the time, and me and a group of other grown ass adults would meet in public parks to drink and hurl our bodies on the ground in celebration of our fading youth and our refusal to accept the aging process.
I pulled in four runs with an infield kick in the seventh inning. Kickball games only have seven innings, or at least these particular kickball games did. Naomi was there taking pictures. My face does not look stony or steely or bursting with rage. It looks like a building ready to collapse. In one particularly strange picture I am kicking the ball with a look of tremendous concentration. My gut juts out above my waist, but my leg is straight and true, and the ball is in mid air, racing away from me.
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You didn’t walk out of the apartment – I walked out after you told me you were tired of feeling awful about yourself all the time. You insisted that I leave so that you could be picked up by a friend and taken to a second location. You didn’t say that you didn’t want me to know where you’d be, but it was implied. We’d spent four days together at that point. It was the first time I’d seen you in two years.
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After the kickball game, Naomi took me out for beer and corndogs. I was almost catatonic, gushing about you, about you leaving, barely holding back tears. I was babbling about some stupid bullshit, some concert I’d bought tickets to, as if I was still dating you, as if there was a compact between us that insured you wouldn’t do terrible things to me. Naomi sat and listened and said appropriate, Naomi-ish things. Then she took me to a hotel that her parents were staying in. She was sleeping with them that night, giving me my apartment back. Her parents were welcoming, smiling folk. Offered me coffee, commented on my kickball shirt, asked me about my plans. When I left I was okay for the entire ride home. Then I stepped out of the car and stepped back into my apartment. You were gone, along with most of your things, but you made mistakes, left things behind, as you do.
The Peggy Lee record I’d bought you, your shirt and underwear and a sock. The shirt still smelled like you. I spent the night awake, staring at the nebulous black between my bed and the ceiling, blinking back tears, wondering where you were.
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I gave the ticket I’d bought for you to Laura. She’d quit the office weeks before, but her beauty and vitriol for most human beings was still intact. With her in tow, I bought an overpriced Tom Collins, drank it without knowing what to expect and bounced on the balls of my feet for two hours, screaming along to The Dodos and The New Pornographers. When I drove home, I wasn’t drunk, but I wanted to be. I wanted to crash my car into the Willamette and sit and feel the water rush into cab.
Instead I drove Laura home over the Ross Island Bridge. She leaned across the bucket seat and planted a kiss on my cheek and, running with it, I kissed her back. She unbuckled my seatbelt and lead me across the street from my parked car to her front door and into her room. Her climbing gear was scattered across the floor. I almost tripped over a rock axe, but she stopped me just in time, hands sherpaing me into her bed.
I left just before dawn, contacts gritty on the inside of my eyelids, Laura asleep, or at least pretending to be. I kept myself from crying until I climbed back inside the car, and once I could see again I drove home in the Portland pre-dawn, headlights feebly trying to cut through the summer fog creeping up through Southeast.
*
I never slept with Laura – she was out of my league – way out. I drove her home, gave her an awkward hug, and then drove home to drink alone. I went out to brunch the next day with Naomi and most of the people from Corey’s wedding at Genie’s.
*
Actually, I think you were at that brunch, maybe. Maybe we spent the entire drive there and back not speaking to one another. Or maybe you just spoke around me to Naomi, beaming rage at me from the passenger seat.
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The raindrops splattered the windowpane at first. It was pleasant, made me feel small, and whole by merit of my smallness. This pressing storm, this incoming mass of rain/wind was real, but also not real. It was, in that regard, a bit like you and your memory. I understand that a real person was there was some point, but that person isn’t there any more and the thing that I’ve built, the patchwork creation that sits above my bed now, that is not you. The strain, then, of trying to fit you into this thing, this space, this logical system called the universe where these things just happen, was alleviated; I didn’t have to fit you in. Just your memory.
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The mountain curves on both sides near Couer D’Allene, barely tolerating this city, this place tucked into the heavens. The world could turn to a smoking crater and the people in Couer D’Allene would barely notice, except perhaps for the lack of radio signal and new television shows. In time, they wouldn’t even give a shit about those things or their absence – they’d hunt and smoke and laugh and, once the coast was clear enough, grow weed in the sunniest valleys they could. Men with duck calls around their necks gingerly stroking marijuana plants, stroking their beards, smiling from underneath the bills of their camouflage baseball hats.
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At restaurants, I sometimes pay the bill to avoid watching people try to figure it out, even when I can’t afford to. This is a problem I have.
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I was born in Massachusetts, a horrified, baffled young thing without any sense of self or self preservation. By the time I found myself in Minnesota, barely an adult, an adult in name only, I was ready to be done with the east coast entirely. But things didn’t go as planned.
I ran. I ran from Massachusetts, from Minnesota, from Massachusetts again. When I finally made it to Oregon, I thought I’d found the place where I could settle, where I could build a life for myself. But I was wrong, and so I kept running, back to the east coast.
I’m not sure what I was running from.
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Was I running from you?
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I was, in all likelihood, not running from you.
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I was running from you.
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I was running from the part of me that you built. The part of me that made your memory.
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I was recently at a friend’s wedding in Washington D.C. and another friend’s girlfriend asked me to dance with her. It was cute, awkward, fun. We moved easily, combatively, like a brother and sister who often fought dancing to get their parents off their backs. We matched steps and ran our legs into one another for three whole songs before I stepped back, laughing, and told her that I needed to get her boyfriend. She sniffed and told me that I didn’t need to – they didn’t even have sex anymore.
I’m never entirely sure why people tell me things like this, but it seems to happen often.
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This is an important plot point. It will come up a few times in this story, so keep it in mind.
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Jenny is a rare constant in my life. Across states, across years, decades now, she’s been there. Her engine coughs and spits where it once whispered. Hills were always a problem for her, but our journeys across mountains have left her tired. She’ll still face any incline worth taking on, but now she takes them slowly, steadily, pulling herself up second by agonizing second. Cars and trucks swerve around us, honking madly as she progresses, but when we reach the top and I let the clutch out the sound of her tires matches my scream to humming - a single voice – and then the world makes sense again.
I know I’ll have to leave her behind some day, possibly some day soon, but I love her all the same.
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Jenny’s name comes from the name of another person I love, a person who I’ve never felt betrayed or short changed by. This person may or may not appear in this book
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This is a story about love and interstate highways and you.
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