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.]

Ceylon

I stopped trying to edit. I stopped trying to cut out the anxiety, the bills, the rejection letter from my last interview, my mother listening to records alone and two months out of the mental hospital, my rent, the anxiety. Stop, breathe, drink tea.

My job isn't terrible. I don't have to wear a uniform. We have no manager and no real rules. Mostly, I price merchandise and place orders for cups with cats on them. But a tea house is still food service, which means I also heat up blueberry scones and place them on trays with Early Grey. I wash a lot teapots.

Sometimes these teapots chip, and that's when I claim them. I dress them pretty in a box, and I take that box on a bus ride. Forty-two minutes later, the chipped teapot's home, sitting on my kitchen table.

I'm a little chipped too, a bit beat up and over-steeped. I'm trying to roughen my edges as I age instead of sanding them down--give myself a few snarls, wait for the people who want to take me home despite the cracks.

A lot of my co-workers at the tea shop are under twenty, while I'm almost a quarter of a century. I'm probably too old to be working at a tea shop, but I like it. Especially when I meet new faces around Seattle, America's next Silicon Valley. I like saying to the busy bees of Amazon, tech start-ups, and and the elegantly aging Microsoft: "I work at a tea shop."

This isn't very profane. I don't need to be smart to do this job, nor do I need to be motivated, creative, or giving. Rainy mornings find me rinsing Ceylon leaves out of teapots. I sweep a lot of toilet paper bits off the floor of the women's bathroom. Mitra, a Buddhist monk, is always at the third table translating old Sanskrit texts into English--which really means that he has conversations with Cody and Indryani about meditation and ways of higher being. The walls are yellow like a wash of flowers, and instrumental music plays from the speakers.

Software developers are generally one of two types: soft, kind in the face, living alone in a townhouse. This type is generally identified by their beards. The second type of software developer is "bro," meaning he wears button-downs, is clean-shaven, and drinks too much beer. Those with mustaches are a second, worse, subcategory. I've yet to meet a female techie.

And so we'll often meet--me, the ignorant, lazy, uncreative, and selfish tea shop employee, and he, the bearded loner or chiseled white man in a button-down, and we'll have this conversation:

"What do you do?" [Me, already guessing.]

"I develop software for Amazon." [Him, almost abashedly.]

"And what do you do?" [Him, a little excited now.]

"I work at a tea shop." [Me, really saying, "I'm a little chipped and broken. I don't have a nice, high-paying job. Sometimes, I take home broken teapots because I can't afford to buy them. I'm carving out a strange life for myself on the opposite side of the country from where I grew up. I'm twenty-three, and I don't really know what I'm doing. I work at a tea shop, and I'm poor and broke and far from home, but I'm glad I don't develop software for Amazon."]

My body wasn't made to be strong. I have fat thighs that make biking up hills a shitty time. My knuckles crack too easily. The bags under my eyes are their own pillows.

In high school, I was the kid who couldn't remember her freshman year. Forget that I started at a new school, rode the bus for the first time, experienced being thirteen with a fresh set of teenagers--literally, forget it all. None of this made an impression on me. I don't even remember the anxiety of my first class. I think I might have been late.

Or perhaps, the changes confused me so much that I retreated into myself, erasing an entire year of my life.

My body wasn't made to be strong.

Now that I'm twenty-three, I try to summit a mountain once a week, or at least make it out to hike. When I bike to work--which is every day--the ride is always uphill. I rock climb so often that my climbing shoes have holes after a month.

I'm making myself stronger, and I do it by tearing myself down. Sometimes I prefer the bodily exhaustion, while other times I revel in my emotional misery. How intensely can I feel something? How much can I struggle?

I have a blog that consists entirely of pictures of my face. After five years, I can now spend hours going through my face in stages. They show world travels. They show nights at home in bed with tea. Some show various states of undress. A lot of them are me at my most miserable, crying, afraid that I'm pregnant, having just failed an exam, suffering from a breakup. They're beautiful portraits of myself, and I study them with unabashed vanity, trying to dissect if I've grown through these broken versions of myself, if I've made my body stronger.

And I think what I'm most afraid of, is that under all this, all these masks of misery and struggle, I'm just a weak person struggling through all of life's different complexities. That at the end of the day, I haven't gotten any stronger. I'm simply miserable and afraid.

But I keep tearing myself down, telling myself my muscles will build back harder, and that the struggle will make me stronger.

It's near noon and there are things to be done.

I'm at that point where I hate everything I write.

The house smells like meat, slightly metallic or like burning fat.

When I was a child, I'd pull my shirt up over my head and run around the house like a stuck pig. I still do that, but only when I'm alone. Sometimes, even when I'm in public, I'll pull the neckline of my shirt up just under my eyes and squint.

I can't escape the smell of burning flesh by pulling my shirt over my head, or even by running out of the room like a stuck pig. I have nowhere else to go, so I feel my cheeks growing red from the blankets tucked around my body. The comforter is hot on my stomach, because I have the hem of my shirt pulled up over my breasts. I'm wearing my nude-colored bra, the kind you're not supposed to wear when you want to have sex the same night.

I'm not worried about having sex tonight.

The edges of my window frame are dark, and the clock reads twenty past eleven, so I know it's night. My bones feel heavy, and there's tension in my left thigh from where I stretched too hard this morning, so I know it's night. I'm alone, so I know it's night.

 The redness in my cheeks has moved up to my ears, somehow starting at the back and wrapping around the soft skin, down the curve, stopping just at the tip of the earlobe. Everything is hot and red, except for the window framed by night.

When I was a child, I'd build forts of pillows behind the couch. The wall back there was cracked with age, the plaster protruding forth in a great bubble of white paint and drywall. I was in one of my smaller forts the day I knocked over the lamp. The light bulb shattered, and I cleaned up the shards one by one.

The room's so hot, and I've gotten rid of my blankets and comforter.