no regrets no looking back and no goodbyes

I get so homesick.

I'm a country girl. We know this. And I ache sometimes for the hot breeze and tobacco-colored rimrock cliffs, sitting on my dusty car's hood looking up at a sky bigger than anything, somewhere on a potholed back road out at the edge of the big pines. For soaking in the river and baking on a boulder till dry, scrambling over the jumbled basalt with skinned elbows and a big pocketknife in sturdy jeans. For walking up logging roads and past split-rail ranch fences, sometimes with an eye to where I might park with a girl once the moon came up. I knew every flower by name, could tell you which bird just by its silhouette.

Back home, past the rusted-out stacks of the empty mill, you can see the Milky Way oozing glitter across the arch of everything. The train tracks go forever and so does the horizon, except where stretching calderas come up, a great cradling hand, to hold the boundaries of the knowable.

There's a soda fountain that makes its own chocolates and milkshakes, down there, and you can smell their caramel corn all the way down the street at the little restaurant we all went with our prom dates. Both of the old florists continued to not hire me every summer.

I don't get to go back. Maybe ever. I'm gone from there. I kicked the dust from my boots, packed everything in a station wagon, and ran. As far as most anyone knows, I might be dead.
And I might be, if I did go back. You never know. I did famously at cutting and running, and sometimes that cuts back.

The river cuts through everything there, and everything leads down to it. You just look for the green. We used to jump off a bridge in the summer , where two X's had been scratched into the rail to tell you where was deep enough, and crawl back up through the rocks and shady wild mint patches for another go. You just shucked your shoes and jeans and went, though I was always a big chicken about it.

Quaking aspen and knobby juniper tell you where you are, out there. We don't get those where I live now.

I say awful things about my hometown, bitter, narrow-eyed. Fair enough. It hurt me, bad. But some days, it's just to get away from loving it, from feeling rootless with my feet on all this cement, grasping at bluegrass music and "ain't" and typing inside to stay out of the weather.

I used to dangle my feet over a clifftop, rolled-up jacket for a pillow, and make sketches of every growing thing. I knew what time of year the dragonflies would have their highspeed aerial junctioned relations. Sitting up on my parents' roof in the snow, I'd watch the first melt sigh and plop off the branches. I'd shoo the deer from the summer garden, see if the coyote'd come by, and head down the road to town, singing.

They hurt me, and I ran, and I can never go back. But I can't honestly say there's nothing for me there.

I live in a city with art museums and film festivals and statuary. There's a queer community, and your choice of Thai restaurants, and roses everywhere. There are actual other Filipinas. There's opera. There's my little creaking house with its overstuffed bookshelves and ancient stove. There's the woman I'm marrying.

But I've never yet seen an osprey stoop for a steelhead trout here. It's been years since I've pulled off the road, sat up on the hood of my truck, and named constellations like old friends.

Maybe I'm just not a teenager any more, and don't notice these things. Maybe, in a world that seems a little grimmer and more complicated, I've just let my sense of wonder slip, let the sky get a little less big. But maybe I'm just homesick for a home that didn't want me, an old lover that'll never take me back.

Nostalgia is foolish and dangerous. I've made a new home and a new life, with plenty of joy in it. The riotous wealth of subcultures and body-mods, the sidewalks that don't roll up at seven, the new places to go that don't run out, the people, all matter. I get giddy at the press and smells and close-in messy human wonderfulness at Pike Place Market, grin affectionately at the ornate Victorian houses Southeast Portland has long since rented out for duplexes to college kids and station-wagon dykes raising kids. I can rent Bollywood movies, for Gods' sakes. There's colors here I never knew existed, before. Besides, nobody pretends that my hometown is still what it used to be, anyway.

Nostalgia is foolish and dangerous, and I have the scars to prove it. Life goes on, often into something richer, fuller, more honest, more whole. But a leopard can't change her spots sometimes, and for everything that's changed, some things never do, and I can't shake the feeling, some days, that I'm in exile.



(This post had a soundtrack, on the train when I wrote it. It's Kim Richey's "A Place Called Home," for the record.)

hit the road, jack

Spokane

I have a strange relationship with the highway.
I ache for it, sometimes, need desperately to get out on it, but I shudder at going too fast, and my shoulders tense up into stabbing pain, and I’m troubled by what the highway means. Still, opening out on the blacktop, stopping in random places and breathing them in before continuing, it’s a peculiar love affair and has more than a little to do with running away.
It’s almost as conflicted a relationship as I have with my country, which I love, which I’ve been considering with increasing seriousness fleeing for shelter somewhere else, somewhere, ironically enough, less dangerous, less exhausting, less likely to cause me to lose perspective and give in to despair. So it’s funny that I found myself on Interstate 90 at midday on Independence Day, fighting it out with the early July sun and all alone in a metal cocoon ready to hash it all out.
We used to call my car the Mighty Chariot, for the drag races I’d won as a teenager and certainly not for anything I’d done with young women in the passenger seat during those same years. It’s a station wagon, and it’s got a big dent in the side that’s my fault, and I pat the dashboard when it performs especially well. We’ve been close since I was sixteen, and though I’m notoriously nervous about machines, I sometimes forget, on long trips, that we’re separate. I used to hate driving. Moving that fast with my feet off the ground terrified me, and so did relying on machinery I couldn’t watch work, but familiarity breeds many things besides contempt.
The highway’s a weird non-place, all about being on the way to somewhere, never about being anywhere, and you start to see cars as people, not as vehicles with people in them. That Chevy over there did a thing, not the Chevy’s driver. That pickup over there is being a jerk. And there’s tribes.
I cannot leave behind my fear of the squad cars, as they dart in and out of traffic as great fish, as wolves dividing a herd. It is unreasonable, it is paranoid, but I still get shaken every time I see a police vehicle, even one I know for certain is helping people, even one I know is helping me. Ever since one bad night, I just freeze up, even when I know rationally I’ve got nothing to hide or worry about.
The highway’s a strange place, but I’m on it, at the northeast extremity of Washington State, headed westbound for friends who wait where the sun sets. Out here, I’m reminded of eastern Oregon, which is much alike and hard to distinguish if you put photos side-by-side, and I think, I could do this. I could come out here and wear sturdy jeans and drive a beat-up pickup, I could bale hay and be tough as my old tomboy days and find myself a cowboy hat to fit my outsized head. This out here, though I fled it for the city, this is familiar, this is standard. I could come out here, I could come stay by these ragged fenceposts, I could belong to this land if it weren’t for the people in it, who I know are good folk but who don’t know I am.
Highways like this, I used to run alongside, for hours and miles at a time, and I knew all of the ranches by sight, back there. I used to drive out with my camera and find old trees that cast interesting shadows. I quit piano lessons to learn to care for livestock, once, and that might be part of why I never became the musician my brothers did, and might, really, be part of why I carry a first-aid kit today.
Maybe, I think to myself, still wanting to pull over and buy a hat somewhere for no good reason, maybe I’m just going through my horse phase.

Somewhere near Sprague

The sun is blazing directly overhead in a vast and gauzy sky, and it’s dry enough to crisp the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The flat horizons on all sides just disappear into vagueness instead of going up the way I expect them to, unlike anything except my memories of driving out West in our minivan when I was six and staring out the window at endless expanses of Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa. That way, I think, that just keeps going till Canada. That way is the Columbia and then it keeps going, all the way to Utah. That way’s the Rockies, and that way’s the Cascades, too far to see. There is no way to appreciate how many shades of brown and yellow and gold and tan and buff and taupe there are until you’ve been out to the high desert, this part sectioned off into huge rectangles and occasionally irrigated. I let it all blend together, only stopping once to pull over and ask a couple changing the tire on their camper if they need a hand. They tell me no, and I stroll back along the shoulder to my car, grasshoppers the color of everything else swirling around my feet. There is a clunky old cell phone lying in the gravel by the edge of the pavement, and I give it a glance before leaving it face-up for the crows to enjoy.
Traffic slows to a crawl for something that involves multiple squad cars and an ambulance, and a bearded biker in his goggles and leathers waves traffic around it. On the back of his black leather vest is a yellow cross and the legend, TRIBE OF JUDAH JESUS CHRIST IS LORD. As I pass, I see the paramedics and police bent over a man prone, in biker clothes himself, and then it’s all moving again.
The radio in Eastern Washingston is something else. If it’s not country music with bad reception, it’s about God, and only one version of one God in particular. I listen to a sermon about how the best part of being a Christian is the gifts you get at the end, that really, it’s all about knowing for certain that in exchange for your—it’s left indistinct, but participation, at least—God has promised some nice things for the end, which is around the corner, fine things. I find myself wondering if this preacher has ever loved his God for anything but the Cracker Jack prize at the bottom of Creation, and the country song that comes on about how God will turn His face from us and give up if we don’t leave Him in the Pledge of Allegiance sets me wondering. Can’t we do better than this, I argue aloud with the radio, thinking of Rabi’a’s torch and bucket. Surely we can do better than this.
I tune in to another long sermon, holding with it for a while, enjoying the reverend’s gravelly voice. He goes on about how yes, when God promised Abraham a blessing on his seed, that was fulfilled through Christ’s act of mercy, but that’s not all, that’s surely not all. In Abraham’s children, in this man’s scripture, God’s blessing was also expressed in, as he says it, the tribe of Abram’s “military intervention” into the affairs of Sodom and Gomorrah, the “liberation” of its people. So do we, as heirs of Abraham, he says, have a responsibility to do the same. “The English-speaking people of the world,” he says, are the true and only heirs of Abraham, and to them falls blessing and burden. Christ’s grace is well and good, but how can we, as “the only nation in the world powerful enough to project freedom wherever we choose,” not intervene militarily as Abraham did, given the opportunity? I wonder about his phrasing, his citation of our power as evidence of our being the true heirs of the Hebrew legacy, about his choosing to say that we go where we choose, not where God chooses. I seek along the tuner band until I find another country station. Let’s roll, America, sings a man who no doubt wears a big hat, ‘cause God is on our side. And I think not of Rabi’a, but of Lincoln, who could not dare to make such a claim, who prayed that we would find it in ourselves to be on His side instead. On another station, the only woman I’ve heard all day prays that women all over the country will learn to be more loving to their husbands, be more obedient to the Word as it applies to serving a man “no matter the cost,” and I have to swallow, hard.
It becomes apparent that many of these radio men talk more about America than about their God, and I’m not sure what that means—about this nation, not the Kingdom of God, about our promised glories but not about the poor, or the sick, or the naked. One of them calls Social Gospel a blasphemy, but explains himself in kind tones, and I find myself at a loss.
They are all of the radio stations, this deep into the steppes and scrublands, and I continue to listen.

George

I pull off of I-90 into George, Washington, remarkable only for its too-cute name and the nearby Gorge Amphitheater, home to concerts that seat thousands and near nothing else at all. In central Washington, the farmland competes only with tawny hills, and this close to the river, those hills crumple the landscape and cradle little pull-offs like George not lovingly, but without rancor. Stopping my car in the lot of the shiny new gas station, directly across from the beat-up one with the case of ice for sale, I drag my red bandanna off my head and around my neck like a kerchief, ready to make it a dust mask. The taqueria I was hoping to hit has closed for the holiday. I have been at this intersection twice before in my life: once, on my way east the day before, to gas up my car and lift the hood to make sure that my CHECK ENGINE light didn’t mean anything in particular, just another pretty Latina on the way to somewhere else, not yet in today’s disguise, the wind tugging at a suede A-line the color of the landscape. Once, more than three years ago, in the middle of the night, returning from a concert at the amphitheater, my friends asleep in the back and too high to care, my girlfriend crumpled over her seat and looking serene despite the fight we’d been in before she dropped off. I had waited a while before I realized that I needed to pump my own gas in this strange state, and when I got out to operate the nozzle, there were two girls from my hometown in the next car, sweaty, tired, amused. Both times I used the beat-up gas station, and deliberately.
Today, I take a deep breath of the dusty wind and find that I cannot shake my desire to find a cowboy hat. The general store down the way looks promising, and I pull into its parking lot, walk in looking absurd, don’t find what I’m looking for amidst the work gloves and dry goods and packaged snacks. I say howdy to the bespectacled blonde woman at the register and pay for a tamarind soda and a Pepsi that was on sale, trying to be polite. GOD BLESS AMERICA, says her t-shirt, and her husband, a vast and ruddy fellow with a white beard and leather pate, wears one to match. It appears to be his picture on the donation can by the till, which proclaims that someone’s house burned down, and I hope it’s not these sweet folks, but that’s the way of things now and then. I wish her a happy Independence Day and wander out, stopping by the van in the parking lot to read their menu, all in Spanish. They serve lengua and cabeza, so they check out, and I surprise myself by not attempting any Spanish when I order. Perhaps it’s out of embarrassment; all the men ahead of me are old migrant workers, stocky and windworn, like all of the Mexican families in the dusty lot a few yards away, looking at tractors all lined up like it’s market day. There is no sales tax on my tacos, and I eat them quietly, in the closest thing there is to shade. Every other business on the block—which is to say, every other business here, since everything else in sight seems to be gas stations, tractors, or housing—is out of business, their spaces for rent, some still with Hallowe’en decorations up. Nowhere to go but the fields, which stretch unavoidable in all directions, dry and brown. Popping the cap on my soda with a multitool from my emergency kit and slamming the hatchback shut, I put my car into gear, put my sunglasses back on, and get back on the highway, jockeying for position with boat trailers and pickups, leaving George behind.
I had told myself no more stops, but I’m in no special hurry. and I take an exit where the sign tells me there’s a viewpoint. It’s a shelf of basalt out over the gorge, and below me is the Columbia, much nearer her source than I’m used to, impossibly blue between brown-gold banks and steep cliffs the color of tobacco and sunsets. A sere wind takes all the moisture out of my mouth and nostrils and I ponder just following the river back to its mouth where I came from, but the highway map doesn’t agree with that notion. I pour out water from my canteen and bow, but when I take a drink, it’s hot and bitter from two days in the car.
It’s time to get back on the road, time to keep moving and know that I’ll see this river later, at a less young place, where it’s fed by another river I love.
I refuse to turn off again when I see a sign for the petrified ginkgo forest, but I do leave the window down all the way to Yakima.

Iron Horse to Snoqualmie Pass

As the land shrugs and folds and finds itself a coat of pine, I can see the jagged teeth of the Cascades coming up ahead, and here in the foothills with one foot in the desert and one in the Ponderosas and volcanoes I find myself thinking, home. I was born on the Chesapeake Bay, thousands of miles away, but I have only one blurred memory of that place; I insist on thinking of this as the land the birthed me, that shaped me. These mountains, this indifferent sagebrush, this is my homeland. For all my railing, this is my homeland, this is where I come from. This is a place I understand.
No matter where I go in the world, no matter how many places adopt or astound me, I cannot escape that.

Snoqualmie to Seattle

Higher up in the pass I pull over into a ferny trailhead and call a friend for directions to his place, and the police pull up in a white SUV meantime, waiting for me to produce a recreational pass, break into a parked hiker’s car, or be on my way. I choose that third option after relieving myself courtesy the Forest Service, but when the turnoff finally comes up, I’m blocked by a semi and miss the exit.
There is nowhere to turn around, so I just keep going past all these places named by people who aren’t here any more. Sammamish. Issaquah. I only stop for gas before blazing across the Mercer Island bridge, level with a glittering lake, and into Seattle proper with daylight to spare. I find myself performing too much at dinner, not appreciating my friend, who I’ve missed, nearly enough. I’m itching for the road again, telling myself it’s just because I’m tired and sore and want to get back to my own bed, or get back in time to meet friends on the rugby field, or have my own radio stations back when I press the preset buttons on my console. So I excuse myself, and hug goodbye for now, and promise to come back soon.

Seattle to the river

As I pull away from Jess and her work friends and the brightly-colored house she’s taking care of, I light up a cigarette, put on the radio, become briefly lost in the north of Seattle before I finally muddle my way to I-5 and begin to glide the overpasses of downtown. The sunset is winding down, and fireworks begin to launch over the bay, and I get a long glimpse of the Space Needle, lit up and somehow kind for all its World’s Fair alienness, somehow warm, a flag flying from its point, dominating the skyline out my right-side window. The interstate takes me past the stadiums, lit up red, white, and blue; across the Sound I begin to see the flashes of distant combustions, and I begin to rethink my troubles with the rockets’ red glare.
After last year, standing in choking gunpowder smoke, fireworks a weapon against me as I tried to read a Declaration of Independence nobody seemed to recognize, I turned my back on fireworks. Portland’s display began behind me as I left a perfect viewpoint, walked across the Hawthorne Bridge shaking and near tears, and drove home to write bitterly about my grief for the nation. The flashes of light I had seen before, and now the wonder of it, the thirty seconds of ooh and ahh before they became repetitive, that had been taken, too: the bombs bursting in air, for me, had become just another glory in our ability to blow up other folk, a lightshow to celebrate hubris and distract citizens from their history and rights.
I don’t sit still for them, this year. I hit the road, south on I-5, thinking I’ll ignore them and take advantage of everyone else’s foolishness to make good time on the highway. As darkness falls, I begin to see them, to the left and to the right, multiple displays simultaneous as I pass through them, like the storm-chasing I used to do in the desert back home, heat-lightning making white whole sections of the sky. From backyard and city center, over wood and water, blossoms of color, silent, exuberant, behind hills and tucked in bays, cascade on all sides and sometimes directly above. As I listen to a radio report on the latest Nobel Peace Prize and grassroots activism in Kenya, every township sends up fountains of shivering light. There is no time to stare at any, as I barrel through the night at a mile a minute. Just pockets and showers and moments, pink cauliflower and hissing undulation and the knowledge that a thousand thousand towns out there in the dark are doing the same, and I forget, for a while, about nation, about this pride in a country, just seeing human beings tossing aloft tiny starscapes and saying, here I am, here I am, here I am. Tacoma. Olympia. Sleater-Kinney, Pe Ell, Kalama, Vancouver. As the darkness grows and the lights begin to fade, getting toward midnight, NPR becomes staticky and indistinct, and I push a tape into the player, turn it up to compensate for the age of the cassette.
Hold me closer, tiny dancer, croons Elton John, count the headlights on the highway, as I count the endless litany of truck stops and Food Next Right and Portland, 64 Miles.
Here I am.
Here I am.
Here I am.


Happy Fourth of July.

on roses and postscripts

When I was in junior high, I volunteered at a local museum--worked with animals, taught tracking classes, showed kids how to pan for gold and make apple cider, all that. There was a boy there I didn't get along with so well, name of Charlie; we worked together on the newsletter and frequently stepped on each other's toes, because we were both pompous and smart and had something to prove.
Some time later, clean-cut Charlie and I were in high school together. We'd evolved; Charlie was an overweight goth who loved to shock people, and I was just going into my beatnik phase--you know, crying at the end of "The Dharma Bums," black turtlenecks, poetry readings at the local cafe, leather jacket, the works. We traveled in different circles, but for one: Charlie was out to some of us as gay, and I was eventually out to a very few people as bi. And it drove me crazy; Charlie always pushed the limits, one step past far enough, and I always argued that his shock tactics made him and the rest of us look bad. I'd argue quietly with straight friends for queer rights, and share the bed with the gay guy in choir on school trips, to show everyone he was okay. Charlie, meanwhile, would be shaving off his eyebrows, using the women's bathroom, coming to school in a skirt. I stopped being known as the smart kid--I was the poetic kid, now. And Charlie was, proudly, the freak.
We worked together, for a while, founding a student forum. Our principal came weekly; he was a good man, and listened to us when we had ideas about school policy or told him something wasn't working. The popular, elected leadership kids put on assemblies; Charlie and I and a few others were the ones the administration actually listened to. After the Columbine and Springfield shootings, they put us on statewide TV as an example of how a student body should take care of its own--and, in fact, one boy told me once, in private, that he'd been pondering a copycat shooting himself, but felt the forum gave him a voice and a feeling of having earned respect, and he was finding his way in the world. The house that Charlie and I built, albeit uneasily, meant something, and we went to other schools teaching them to do the same, and advised principals from neighboring towns by the end of the year. It was good-cop-bad-cop: Charlie, the Marilyn Manson fan, pushed the envelope, drew in those who wouldn't have listened otherwise; I, the clean-cut distance runner and theater kid, would orate for a while in the middle ground, looking more reasonable; stuff got done. Charlie helped a lot of kids, but I usually got the attention. I was the photogenic one, after all. I tried, with false teenage magnanimity, to be his apologist sometimes.
We were both overcompensating.
Charlie didn't show up at school for a while, senior year, but that wasn't unusual. What was unusual was the content of the card I got from the principal in class, the morning after I'd won the local Rotary's award for community service. In it he congratulated me, and told me I'd do well next year at college, and expressed his confidence in my future. At the end:

"PS-- I was sorry to hear about the death of your friend Charlie."

I walked out of class in a daze, spent the day holding people who were crying, arguing with the vice-principal until he was finally browbeaten past his lame excuses into lowering the flag to half-staff for five minutes--it'd been down for a whole day, a few weeks before, for an alumnus of the high school who'd died in a helicopter crash. We began to hear details: Charlie had run away to Portland, had been there for a while, and that's why we hadn't seen him lately. Charlie was a street kid. Charlie was hanging out at a local youth shelter, getting his life together. Charlie was taking estrogen. Charlie had died of a heroin overdose.
First try. Just tried the junk once. Bad batch or something. An OD.
Days later I spoke at the memorial service. His family talked about how he was a good Christian boy, and glossed over who he'd been for the past few years. His friends talked about how they missed him. A piece of a film he'd been making with other street kids was screened.
I spoke about how crazy Charlie drove me. How his constant envelope-pushing got on my nerves and made me uncomfortable. And how we'd all been lucky for it, because Charlie being Charlie made it possible for all the rest of us to fly under the radar, to stay safe, to build bridges for ourselves and live our own lives because he was drawing the fire toward himself. And how I missed him, more than I'd ever expected to.
It was the first memorial service I had ever attended. We all wished we'd been there, in those last few days, in those last few hours. Known how bad it was. PS--I was sorry to hear about the death of your friend Charlie.

Charlie was the first transgendered person I ever met, even though I didn't know it at the time, because I'd never heard of such a thing, such a possibility. I wasn't safe enough to tell, anyway; I couldn't be trusted with it. I only use the pronouns I do because those were the ones I knew, and I was informed later that he was using both standard sets interchangeably up till the end. PS. PPS.

Tonight I went down to a local youth center to see a presentation on certain medical procedures relevant to the trans community. I was dressed conservatively--sweater over collared shirt, blue jeans, clean, sensible boots, hair pinned halfway up--in a room full of punks, suits, tattoo queens, physicians. As I was mingling after the question-and-answer session, I saw something pinned to the wall--a piece of paper, with a poem dedicated to Charlie, two dates after his name. I pulled back. Next to the poem, a lock of his hair, pinned to the wall. And a board next to that, with messages dedicated to him. And above that, a big black-and-white photo. And more notes and poems and photos near those. "I miss you" and "we love you" and everything else--a whole wall, interspersed with photos and blessings for another community member, also deceased. They called him "Charlie Rose". Apparently it was a name he'd chosen.
This was where he'd gone. This place had been his new home, and it had been full of new friends. I asked someone in attendance if they'd known him, and they said no, but they knew people who had, and they'd heard "the story"--they spoke in reverent tones, as though it was a sacred legend.
Charlie was known and loved in that place, and missed when he had passed on. He hadn't had to hide.
And yet, inescapably, he had also died alone, at the business end of a desperate needle, and his friends and enemies back home had to hear it over the loudspeaker because none of us had the means to find out personally.

Charlie was--
Charlie was--
PS--Charlie was more brave, then, than a seventeen-year-old me could comprehend being. I was hiding in the bathroom at two in the morning, applying makeup clumsily, scrubbing it off, hating myself, feeling so alone and frightened and freakish that I didn't know what to do but huddle under my covers and shake. I went to school in the day with my buzzed hair and cracking knuckles and photogenic fakery, and I looked down on Charlie-who-would-be-Rose for daring to exhibit a boldness of expression I couldn't even have the courage to dream of. We both lived in fear, but Charlie met it head-on; badly, perhaps, clumsily, ham-handedly. But head-on. I maneuvered. I ran. I shoved it down and prayed and prayed it would go away.
PS--I tried to distance myself from someone I could have known better and who could have known me because I was frightened of guilt by association. I saw that fear and beauty and depth in him and I ran from it because I couldn't take it, and I complained about him aloud in order to make myself seem more normal.
PS--I didn't know Charlie was my friend--I didn't know I was Charlie's friend--until I saw those words. I was sorry to hear about the death of your friend Charlie. I didn't know how much of a damn I gave until I nearly wept, reading at that memorial service, in front of all of Charlie's Sunday-school teachers and every goth in Central Oregon, and I didn't know why because I was that good at lying.
PS--I was sorry to hear about the death of my friend Charlie.

We were sisters, Charlie Rose. We were sisters and we never knew it because we were stupid damn teenagers too busy with ourselves to look at each other and say, you could be someone I could know like myself. We were so busy preventing school shootings and proclaiming on TV that communication was good for young people and so were vitamins and homework, that we never knew.
We could have been there for each other.
Charlie, if I'd been brave enough to be your sister, I could have been there for you.
I can't tell you how much it meant to me to know that, even in that last, lonely moment, you were loved in this town that you and I both ran away to, this city that eats our hometown's freaks and outcasts and sometimes spits them out later knowing themselves better.
You weren't the only one. You weren't the only one and I wasn't the only one and I miss you, you brave, stupid, exhibitionist bastard. You helped me without even meaning to, years after I'd stopped sparing you a thought, years after I, too, had kicked off the pumice dust of the desert that raised us and come here to Portland. And there you were, on a wall.
I miss you.

May you pass peacefully into the distant West, my fallen sister, and rest in loving arms. May you at last know peace.


Goodnight.