I didn't grow up with friends coming over. I had an alcoholic father and a mother who took all her calls in the bedroom. I'd creep close to her door, my bare feet quiet on the carpet, listening to her words through an inch of wood.

My father moved out when I was in third grade, and took all his rage and fury with him. The house was quiet again. He returned again, and left again, and by then I was old enough to stay out late with my mother's car, doing anything to keep away--and my friends away--from home.

~~~~

I don't know how to entertain. I want to please everyone -- my alcoholic father, one mistake away from a horrible fury. My sweet, long-suffering mother, too delicate to consider. All my friends who gave me reasons not to go home. How do you entertain when you've never built a home? I spend long hours cleaning my house, sterilizing the surfaces, preparing food, hiding traces of my life.

 How will my friends feel in my space? Will they judge the moss growing on the patio outside my bedroom? Is the toilet clean enough? Do I have to hide every stack of paper? Why can't I just leave all these things as they are, and talk about them like a human?

As it is, I last had people over on Halloween, almost a year ago. I baked a pizza with hand-made dough in the shape of a jack-o-lantern, with pine nuts for its eyes and teeth. I put the camping chair inside and tried to get people to feel comfortable sitting down. I didn't offer alcohol--perhaps for obvious reasons. And everyone was sent home with a treat bag.

It wasn't casual, but there were people in my home.

~~~

How do I hang out with people, casually? How do I invite them into my home without putting on a show? I don't want to be the little girl hiding behind the door. I want the door to be wide open, welcoming my friends inside.

I don't write like I used to. Ten years ago, I was an English major, while for the last three years, I've spent every day drawing blood and doing lab work monitoring heart rates under anesthesia. There's no way I can come back from that.

Maybe the change isn't bad. Does the world really want me to wax on with every adjective I know, just because words are too beautiful to cut any out?

Or are the facts of the matter better, with a few sparse words I still remember thrown in?

them apples

There's an apple stand off the interstate in northern Washington state. The red barn rises out of the lolling hills and green.

 'FRESH CIDER.'

I've heard stories about how good this cider is: crisp and clear, perfect in late summer or all through fall. The stand's been there for the seven years I've lived here, but I've never been in all the time I've lived in Seattle.

Seven years later, I make it out there. I'm looking to get out of the city for the time. It's an hour and a half drive along a single four-lane road until you see the barn.

When you pull off the interstate, you make a hard round-a-about and end up at a dead four-way. The barn has a gravel lot, and the car tires crush then pleasantly, sounding like when you leave the city to get to your grandma's house in the country. The red barn walls rise in front of your car, the wood a little weathered now that you're close. There's a white farming family manning the place: an older dad and his son, freshly thirty, unloading cases of apples into a large machine that pulps them down and spills out their juice. Heaps of apple pulp lay in piles around them.

Corn fields press in close, swaying behind the barn and the dad and his kid pulping apples. I don't see any orchards, and the only apples I see are in boxes.

Inside the double doors, there are three small children, all tow-headed and under ten. They man the small check-out stand, strangely quiet and shy as two newcomers enter. Their mother works a larger counter across the empty barn, working the donut maker. She's making donuts from a pre-made paste and working the dough with her hands. We order a half dozen, and she pours out a vast plastic jug of canola oil, then fries the dough that's floured her hands.

"Do you own all the corn around your farm?" I ask shyly.

She's older, in her thirties like her husband. These three kids are clearly hers.

"My father-in-law sold all the land a few years ago. The rent it out. The renters plant the corn."

She doesn't offer more explanation, and I'm too embarrassed for her family to ask. Or rather embarrassed by our country, and sad for her family.

Because clearly, there came a time, when it became cheaper, instead of tilling the land the man owned, to sell if it to a large farming corporation, and found it cheap, and quite profitable, to plant lots of corn for cheap and sell it fast, to anyone who would buy.

But the family, they kept the barn. The order some apples--maybe from a local farm in eastern Washington, or maybe from some farm corporation because it's cheaper, and that's all they can do right now. The son, now proprietor of his family's barn, works with his own son to pulp these apples and make some juice. His wife makes apple cider donuts. His babies work the Square app at the counter.

"Do you take card?"

It's a nervous question -- we're already holding the half-dozen donuts. The powder is on my fingers.

It's a stupid question. Of course they take card. How would they ever make a living on just cash? The babies at the register, still shy and sweet, ring me up on Square.

just wait a second, okay?

five years isn't that long of a time, is it? it's not like a new decade started. it's not like I had time to get a second bachelor's degree. (I mean, I did. But I also didn't). I couldn't have changed my profession to science. or moved three times and lived on a houseboat without real plumbing. (the kitchen sink drained into a lake).

my mom didn't sell the house I grew up in, and I couldn't have driven a small boxtruck through a class 4 wind storm and four states to bring her her mattress and heavy wooden bed frame.

we couldn't have a new president. especially not one who thinks you can inject disinfectant into your body to fight germs??

my dad and I didn't visit the statue of liberty that one February, and he definitely didn't elope without telling me to a woman I met just one time. you know, that time in the dark, while she smoked cigarettes on their shared back porch. the one who lives in the other half of his duplex. in new jersey. the place I grew up? the place I haven't been to in over a year.

it's not like there's been a world-wide pandemic or anything.

five years. it's not so long of a while, you know?

Leaving for Magnolia

Bus 24 leaves downtown Seattle for Magnolia every twenty minutes. I'd pick it up on 3rd and Bell, where the homeless people sat outside the dog park by Dan's Groceries. In front of a vacant lot down the street, crackheads sell beaten up shoes off of a blanket. When the bus meets Broad Street, the line turns left under the Space Needle's shadow and barrels down a hill, leaving downtown for the bridge.

Magnolia Bridge makes this bus line. As far as bridges go, this one is pretty shit--grey concrete, no suspension rigs soaring into the sky, a lot of traffic. The Nisqually earthquake damaged the bridge fourteen years ago, but no one's made any improvements, and its concrete is crumbling. The bridge spans paved tidelands that now hold warehouses and cruise line terminals. One of the bus's stops is in the middle of the bridge, right there in the margin with traffic rushing one side of the bus and straight drop to concrete on the other. Old Hispanic men and young white guys in coveralls get off and head into Ivar's, a fish shop, or climb down the rickety staircase to the railroad tracks under the bridge. My first summer in Seattle, I ran out of time walking from Magnolia to downtown. It was the very end of summer, one of October's last good days. The blue sky waned, and although my face was sunburned, rain clouds threatened over Smith Cove. I stopped in the middle of the bridge, straddling the sidewall as I waited, one foot perilously close to the rushing traffic, the other dangling over a parking lot below. The wind picked up, licking my hair. The light dissapated into the aftertaste of blue sky, bringing grey clouds, and my skin stung with the day's sunburn and the briny air of the coming storm. In the distance, the Space Needle looked surprisingly large between the hill and the vast body of water. The bus arrived, pulling to a stop in no man's land, caught for a moment between downtown and Magnolia. The doors opened, swallowed me. I rode with my legs stretched over a row of seats, my forehead against the glass. The choppy waves disappeared as we crossed the bridge into downtown.

Magnolia is suburbs: it's babies in strollers, white people with money, mom and pop stores on main street. I love Magnolia. It's a Twilight Zone episode where the city is a black and white set where moms still wear house dresses and every house costs a million dollars. The neighborhood, set on a vast, fat peninsula, has only three roads connecting it to the rest of the city. Magnolia Bridge is one of the roads.

I used to go to Magnolia a lot. Their library is sweet--a Magnolia tree, heavy with white blossoms in the springtime, watched over their entrance. Everything, even their front doors, is made of big, beautiful blocks of wood. The interior is a single room of windows and low bookshelves and open space. The furniture was designed by a guy named George Nakashima, and each chair is estimated at $1500. Bus 24 stops right by the library, and I'd ride the line through the suburb's back streets, eyeing the trellises, the balconies, the Victorian charm. There were maybe two bus stops on Main Street; the rest were outside beautiful homes, stepping off sidewalks well-used by little feet. By wintertime, my bus ride was through the dark, and the homes would be lit from the inside like Thomas Kinkade paintings. Those bus rides made me sleepy. My stomach always felt warm.

One night, the bus stopped besides one of these warmly lit million dollar cottages. A girl was waiting, alone. She was obviously cold, rubbing her hands together despite her thin gloves. The street was empty for a mile, lit just with yellow windows set back behind hedges and trees. The bus doors opened, swallowing her, taking her from this lonely place to downtown. I felt a strong rush of affection for my city--my city--at the end of the line, in downtown. The indistinct sounds from the sports bar next door, the low wail of sirens through the night, and the look of surprise from pedestrians as I turned my bike around a tight corner for the alley behind my house. I liked leaving my front door with a ceramic mug of tea and walking by Tavolata and Wasabi, both solid walls of glass windows and people dressed in silk enjoying cocktails.

Downtown Seattle is dirty. The few skyscrapers of downtown seem gross and overreaching. Most of the city's bad is centered in Belltown, known for its drugs and decaying hamburger wrappers at the bus stops. There's a homeless guy famous for his "I want a fat bitch" sign. Third Avenue is the worst of it, with the string of homeless services giving berth to a population with an aggressive approach to passing women. Belltown is a mix of homeless, tourists, and increasingly, young techies with start-up money. Downtown is a paradox. It's living in a temporary space. It's the city--but it's not.

I've since moved away from Belltown to the Central District, which kind of reminds me of the suburbs of Magnolia, if suburbs were poor and colored differently from white. It's known as the gunshot neighborhood, which is ridiculous with the amount and rate of gentrification. We don't have a main street, we don't have skyscrapers, and we don't have a lot of stores. We're mostly houses. There's Cappy's Boxing Gym one block from my house, three bars, and enough Ethiopian restaurants to feed you for a month. But we're Seattle too.

Seattle is a bunch of neighborhoods someone stuck together and called a city. Each one is vastly different. Usually, there's a lake or a hill or a part of the Puget Sound physically dividing the neighborhoods from each other. The city has 149 bridges. Water makes up almost half of the city, occupying 41% of its total area. The Lake Washington Ship Canal literally divides the city in half.

All I'm saying is, there's a lot of no man's land. There's a lot of places, and a lot of time, to find a space here.

Last Night

People come and go. Sitting at this shore at night, with the I-90 bridge lit in a mile-long string of evenly spaced lights. The waves especially violent tonight. A plane roaring overhead before it disappears into fog. Pepper spray in my pocket from Easton, the night sky heavy and dull rather than hot with heat and sunset, me swimming with skinny boy that was my first Seattle best friend. No lover eating ice cream beside me, freezing in a thin rainshell. (Me, plucking at that jacket as I try to break up with him in Cal Anderson). The cool metal of the railing of this chair as I sit above the waves, Bellevue lit in golden towers over the lake, flickering red gems. Clouds low, my head nearly in them, slight breeze.
Mum, home, in bed, in her red checkered night gown, trying to fall asleep. Me, viscous with myself for not being there, for not being able to live in New Jersey.
My gloves smell like old climbing shoes and chalk. Faintly of cat piss.

It's comforting.

The slow span of car headlights breaking the night--flash of fear I'll be seen.

End.

this is gross. don't read it.

[Phone ringing. A girl is biking. It's the nice part of her ride -- the quiet neighborhood under Union Street where trees overhang single-lane roads. The world is passing very quickly in blurred green, black pavement, and blue.]

J: Fuck. Not now. Fuck, fuck, fuck. [Pauses a long moment after receiving the call. Labored breathing from the ride, or from the call.] Hey.
N: Hey! How are you?
J: Fine.
N: Cool. I'm at my house now. Sorry I missed your note about meeting up earlier, but is there any chance you're still in the area?
J: No...I'm headed north, past the U. District.
N: To Magnuson Park?
J: What? How did you know?
N: Because I'm  behind you.

[She has a desperate moment were she wishes this is true. She's biking around a curve, up a slight incline, her phone to her ear -- but still, she looks back for him. There's just a patch of trees, dead with winter.]

N: When do you want to meet instead?
J: [Still out of breath.] Tuesday?

[He takes a long time to decide if this works for him, going back and forth between, "Yeah...I guess...wait, maybe, let me think...no, Tuesday should work, yeah.]

N: How are you, by the way? How was your trip to the east coast? How's your mom?
J: [Short. Begrudging.] She's fine.
N: Is now a bad time?
J: Yeah, I'm actually biking.

[The world is passing very quickly in blurred green, black pavement, and blue. He laughs, and her front wheel jerks violently as she over corrects and almost falls.]

N: Okay, Jess. [Still laughing, a smile in his voice.] See ya.

[Scene's colors speed up until the green and blue are overtaken by black.]