In Which There May Always Have Been Trash In The Yard

The Second Story

by JOSIANE CURTIS

My mom doesn’t go upstairs anymore.

The entire second story looks disheveled and crowded and lonely, as if the contents of an unorganized attic have spilled out into it. I expect that my old bedroom would look unlived in but hers, too, what used to be hers, is like an overgrown garden. A junkyard. Things I can’t find in any of my memories litter the ground – literally, not like scattered but littered like trash, unwanted things thrown where they don’t belong. Two old mattresses, one propped up against a wall and one sheetless on the floor. Empty baskets and board games and stacks upon stacks of tired books. The blinds on one window hang crooked, a tapestry haphazardly draped across the other. In the bathroom, the showerhead drips and I wonder how long it’s been dripping. Days? Years? I haven’t been back in years, and so, maybe.

And outside. In the movie The Lion King, Simba runs away from home after his father is killed. Eventually, he returns to the pride lands, and where he remembers a lush, green kingdom, the landscape is black and barren. There is no food. The animals that remain exist among leafless trees and charred bones.  

I drive up to the house about four p.m., and even though four p.m. this time of year is late enough to wash everything in the golden light of the setting sun, it just looks sad. Dry and dusty. Mostly sad.

This is partly a symptom of winter, I know. But it isn’t just that the trees are bare and the bushes of flowers that once lit up the sides of the driveway have all gone brown and dry. Everything is out of place. At the top of the driveway, in a ditch to the side of the gravel road, an empty fish tank greets you before the house comes into view. There is a crate on the front porch with what looks like car parts and a half dozen half-drunken Snapple bottles, the color drained from the labels. There are discarded pieces of furniture and appliances that I’ve never seen before. Four wicker chairs are barely balanced on top of each other, legs skewed outward at odd angles, and I’m sure they never fulfilled their duty as chairs, at least not at this house. A dresser that appears to have once been white, the wood now splintered and paint peeling and parched, is leaned up against the pump house, with another crate of trash and trinkets atop it.  

Vultures circle overhead, and that’s not even a Lion King reference; that is the dirty fact.

I feel most sad for the stained glass windows. My mother built the house herself, for herself. She designed it according to the life she had planned or at least for the future she imagined. She gave the east wall to her bedroom so the sun would kiss her awake in the morning and she would dive into the day instead of pulling covers over her head. She placed the stained glass windows where they could create sunsets across the walls upstairs from dawn until dusk. The second story makes me wonder what else in life is like the question of the tree falling in an empty forest. I know that designs still dance across the white walls of the staircase, across the carpet of her old room, but for what? For who?  If no one sees them, are they still beautiful? If no one lives in it, is it still a home? How do you define alive?

This has turned into a place where things and people are discarded and forgotten. Things and people fall and stay fallen. There are no kings here. Who will pick it all up?

+

My mother can recite the addresses of nearly everyone in her extended family at the drop of a hat, down to the zip code, but she can’t remember the conversation she had with me five minutes ago. She tells me the same three stories over and over for an hour; the one about the dog fight, how she lost her credit card, the reminder to pick up my brother on my way back from Berkeley. I know, mom. Every time there is a moment of silence between us, she jumps to fill it by restarting the story she finished a few moments before.

When I am gone, I carry around a guilt so heavy that knots grow like gnarled tree roots across my back and shoulders. Every time I make plans to return, I tell myself things will be different – that I will be different. I will be better. Kinder. Lighter. This is a story I tell myself over and over, forgetting all the times I have told it before, and it wasn’t true then either. Then I am here, and I try to talk to her and I feel like I am having a conversation with a goldfish. Then I am here, and I am overwhelmed and guilty and scared.

Is this why I write? Because I am afraid that one day I will stop making new memories? How will I even know when it’s happened? Will there be someone to smile and say, in a more gentle voice than my own, if I am lucky - I know, I know, you told me that already - ?

I wonder if it things are really as different as I think they are. Maybe it’s just that I’ve changed. The house is smaller because I am bigger. Or, maybe I notice things now that I wouldn’t have noticed as a child. I’ve wondered about this before, too. Did my mom actually start getting sick and sad when I was a teenager, or is that when I started being able to see it? Maybe there was always trash in the yard; maybe my memory already betrays me. How would I even know?

I watch the stained glass displays for as long as I can, let the light burn itself into my mind so that I can, if I am lucky, remember what 10 a.m. looks like inside that stairwell, and two p.m., and six. And I know there is something flawed in me for pitying the loneliness of these inanimate objects while speaking to my family from separate rooms, for wanting to comfort the house, running my hands over the rotting wood of a door frame while pulling away from my mother’s touch. For coming and going, and being always glad about the going.

I shower before leaving, after waiting for water to recall the climb upstairs through atrophied pipes. The water is rusty at first, but it is hot, and the showerhead is inches above my head so I don’t have to bend my legs or curl my back to wash my hair. I can look up into the falling water and let it pour over me, and forget for a moment, or remember, where I am. The showerhead is high because, like me, my mother is tall, and she built the house for us, and that, there, is something I miss.

I turn the faucet all the way off, wait for quiet to be sure, and leave.

Josiane Curtis is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Portland. She last wrote in these pages about walking through the rose garden and getting close to someone. You can find her twitter here. You can find her website here.

"Home" - Oliver Tank (mp3)

"Different Speed" - Oliver Tank ft. Ta-Ku (mp3)

In Which You Get So Close To Someone

Goodbye for Keeps

by JOSIANE CURTIS

The night I met Brittney, I left the bar and updated my facebook status from my phone on the walk home, a two-beer buzz tingling in my fingertips as I typed. “This just got interesting."

A mutual friend introduced Brittney and I intentionally, knowing there was a chaos we could give each other that she herself did not possess. Within months, it was impossible for either of us to show up alone to a friend’s house, a bar, or even Whole Foods, where we spent the bulk of our paychecks searching for hangover remedies on Sunday mornings, without being asked about our other half.

We had each lost a close friend to an unexpected and far-too-early cause of death the year before moving to Portland. We came from families broken in one way or another. We’d left ex-boyfriends in California and though we mentioned it like we missed them, as if we’d left something good behind, we both knew that the relationships had been over long before we left the state. We could sense these similarities in our pasts before ever talking about them, the way the pound puppies at a dog park seem drawn to each other over the full-breeds, their histories somehow recognizable in each other’s pheromones, or maybe in their eyes.

Our friendship wasn’t just circumstantial. Our personalities are opposite in many ways, which made us well-suited to be friends. Brittney is a social butterfly with a penchant for dramatics; I am drawn to adventure but soft-spoken and sometimes too even-keeled, in need of someone like her to coax me out of my shell.

A few months into our friendship, I was arriving to a baby shower and Brittney’s name showed up on my phone. When I answered, I was greeted by the non-response of someone trying to steady their breath before speaking. I could tell she was trying to stop crying, but she couldn’t; the second she opened her mouth there was a floodgate of breath into the receiver. She gasped for air, barely getting a few words out at a time before collapsing into heavy sobs. Unable to decipher what had happened on the phone, I ditched the baby shower and showed up at her house 20 minutes later with her Whole Foods favorites: coconut water and mushroom barley soup and a cranberry tuna wrap. In the beginning, I was happy to abandon preexisting plans for her, flattered to be her chosen source of comfort. I felt important.

I could sometimes pinpoint the triggers of Brittney’s anxiety attacks, and sometimes they would catch us both off guard. Her first attack, that afternoon, had been sparked by a pocket dial from her ex-boyfriend, whose muffled footsteps and background voices somehow sounded like two people having sex. Certain environments were surefire causes, certain hours of the early morning. At parties, we would often sneak away to the bathroom or a vacant bedroom, where I would talk her down. Sometimes we would lie flat on the floor and count cracks in the ceiling until it passed.

On the other hand, when I closed off, occasionally withdrawing into my apartment for a week with no explanation, she’d show up at my house with burned CDs and bags packed for both of us for an overnight escape from the city. Our first Valentine’s Day together, on the anniversary of my friend Alex’s passing, she drove me to Astoria and we hopped from one beach to another, making our way up the coast until I found one that felt right. We stripped down to our underwear and ran the few hundred yards from the car, across snow-speckled sand, to where low tide had drawn out the water. Our Portland winter bodies were pale and tense and taut as we dove under the frigid waves, wordlessly, soundlessly, too cold to do more than gasp.

After, an SUV approached over the sand as we made our way back to Brittney’s car. A laughing woman rolled down her window.

“I saw you two from across the beach and said to myself, ‘those girls either lost a bet, or they’re drunk.’ I came over to see which it is.”

“Neither!” I struggled to exhale, exhilarated, my skin on fire, and relieved that what I had thought was a lifeguard coming to scold us was this woman instead. “We just…”

“—had to,” Brittney finished for me.

I’m not dramatic enough to say that our friendship saved each other, nor callous enough to say that it simply served a purpose, but like many friendships, especially in this purgatory between youth and young adulthood, ours fell somewhere in between. We balanced each other.  

+

Our friendship was as much a relationship with Portland as it was with each other. We explored the city in a way only possible for two people mutually experiencing a place for the first time. Whereas a born and raised Portlander, or our friend who had lived here five years before us, might guide you through their own highlight reel of the city, together we tripped and tumbled our way through our first Oregon everything.

We frequented dance clubs and then dive bars, famous breakfast restaurants and then diners, fumbling until we found the places we fit. There was the day we ate pot brownies, managed to go on a brewery tour and join in a flash mob, but then got so overwhelmed inside of Whole Foods that we had to call a taxi to take us the six blocks home. There was the night we parked in front of a party and hid in the backseat of Brittney’s car to drink champagne before going inside, but she made me laugh so hard I had to open the door to avoid choking, setting off the car alarm and blowing our cover to the confused group of party-goers on the front porch.

There were weeks we’d get healthy, trade champagne for green juice, wander the city’s farmers markets and make home cooked vegan meals. There was the night we made fresh spring rolls and I accidentally ate half a caterpillar, learning then why you would ever need to wash organic lettuce. (There was Brittney’s uninhibited laughter this night, and many others.) There was a book club, a work party, a road trip to California, a wedding. There were holidays, birthdays, bike rides, and breakups. There was the night I turned on Alex’s music and cried on the couch while she cried in the kitchen, making dinner. There were the things I won’t talk about here. Think of all the memories you have with your best friend – there are all of those things too. 

As with any significant relationship, there are too many memories; I don’t know if I’m making too much of them or not enough.

+

For two years, for the two of us, together was a given. One of us would send the other party details or a link to a show or event, and the other would simply make a plan, buy a ticket, no questions asked. In May, Brittney sent me information about Sasquatch, a four-day music festival in the Washington Gorge, and on Memorial Day Weekend we found ourselves there. That first year at Sasquatch, we were hummingbirds, bumblebees, happy, energetic animals running from one adventure to another. Everywhere we went, my hand extended blindly behind me to where it would find hers, automatically, effortlessly, as if by muscle memory. We made our way to the front of every stage, twisting and weaving through crowds like a strand of DNA. I tried hallucinogens for the first time and found my safe place, the safest place, in her.

The last evening of the festival, Rodrigo y Gabriela were performing on the main stage, when it started to rain. The weather had been gorgeous all weekend, but in the blink of an eye it started to absolutely pour, as if the sky had been holding off an anxiety attack all weekend, and it had finally gotten the best of her. For a moment, Brittney and I tried to cover our heads with the one sweatshirt we had between us, until, realizing the futility of this, we dropped the sweatshirt and our bags, kicked off our shoes, and danced on our tiptoes around the hillside, twirling imaginary skirts to the upbeat flamenco guitar. After about 15 minutes, the rain stopped and the sun came out from the clouds long enough to paint the sky neon before settling against the west wall of the Gorge. We perched on an abandoned backpack, arms linked, teeth chattering, willing our clothes to dry before the sun dropped below the cliffs completely.

“There is nowhere—I mean that, there’s literally not one place I’d rather be right now. And no one I’d rather be with.”

I don’t remember whether she said it or I did, which has become a common problem in many of my memories of us. It felt like the first moment I’d been still in months.  

There is a special bond, an intimacy that emerges only on the heaviest nights and through the harshest of hangovers. Shared vulnerability is necessary for deep friendship, and when you’re guarded, as I am, that vulnerability won’t always volunteer itself. But you can find it in an anxiety attack at four a.m., or waiting for a pregnancy test to develop in a Safeway bathroom, or on the inside of a trash can at a music festival where you throw up while your other half holds your hair out of your face and tells leering strangers to mind their own business.  

+

Ours was a platonic intimacy I thought was reserved for sisters and the friends of my youth; one I never expected to forge anew after college. What I expected even less was that our friendship would fade, quietly, without fault or fight or falling out. Richard Siken writes, “Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.” I have this image of in my head of two ghosts, moving toward each other in an attempt to embrace, but they end up falling through each other and walking away, bewildered, in opposite directions.

“If it wasn’t for you, I would have left Portland a long time ago,” Brittney confessed to me one afternoon, two years into our time together.

I didn’t see it at the time, but Brittney’s confession marks the beginning of the end of our relationship. Though it would be over a year until she moved back to Los Angeles, at that moment, I realized that she would one day leave Portland. Maybe I would pull away to prepare myself for her eventual departure. Maybe I would crumble under the pressure of feeling that depended upon. I wanted to be valuable but not that valuable, important but not explicitly necessary; the Goldilocks of codependency.

We never purposefully stopped hanging out; we just stopped purposefully hanging out. We were us until we weren’t. I moved out of our neighborhood. We bonded with new friends and started dating new men. I went to a new gym and started waking up with the sun instead of going to sleep by it. We still ran into each other at group outings and, when we did, we picked up our friendship wherever we had last seen it. But we were not the same after that day, and our relationship dissolved little by little throughout Brittney’s last year in Portland. In that final year, we didn’t take an overnight drive, didn’t spend a Sunday alone together on Brittney’s couch. Not once.  

+ 

When Brittney announced her upcoming departure from Portland, I took the news almost emotionlessly. I knew my day-to-day life wouldn’t change. But in the weeks leading up to her departure, I felt my stomach drop when I drove past her house or any of our old haunts. I felt a strange sort of sick even catching a particularly pretty view of Mt. Hood. The feeling was familiar, one I’d felt in the weeks before moving away from Calistoga, Santa Cruz, Costa Rica. I consider it a kind of pre-nostalgia for a place you know you’ll be leaving. I wasn’t leaving Portland, but in the weeks before Brittney did, it felt that way.

The morning of her last day, we stood in her disheveled apartment and made small talk about how much packing she had left to do. I remembered the first time I’d been there, Halloween weekend three years before. While trying to finish my costume, I broke a Sharpie and made a giant stain across the seat of her couch. Brittney was unconcerned with the stain, but I spent the next hour, mortified, scrubbing at it frantically. I got the couch mostly clean, but I could still always find its outline when I looked for it. Her couch cushions were propped up against the wall and the stain caught my eye, faint, faded, but still there.

We had left imprints like this one all over each other and all over this city, almost unnoticeable, invisible unless you’re looking.

Our friends all made a point to say “see you later.” “This isn’t goodbye for keeps,” they said. I made a point to say goodbye, knowing that, although I’ll see Brittney again, I will never again see the person she was in this place and time. I was saying goodbye, for keeps, not only to her, but to the person I was with her, to the people we were together, and mostly, to the places Portland was with the two of us in it.

Josiane Curtis is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Portland. She last wrote in these pages about walking through the rose garden. You can find her twitter here. You can find her website here.

Photographs by Joe Curtin.

"Dance Yrself Clean" - LCD Soundsystem (mp3)

In Which We Walk Through The Rose Garden

by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson

Dots on Maps

by JOSIANE CURTIS

I moved to Portland in the midst of the April showers that, I was warned, are known to last clear into July. I knew one person of the city’s 600,000, a childhood friend who introduced me to the Pacific Northwest when she moved after college. I visited twice before making the decision to follow. On my second visit, I remarked about how odd it was that strangers smiled and said “hello” when they passed each other on the street; that was the near-extent of my knowledge about the city. I knew that a river divides east and west, with bridges balanced across it like art installations. In certain neighborhoods, the smell of fresh-baked bread fills the air, often without an obvious source or explanation, the scent hovering everywhere you walk like a balloon tied around your wrist. 

In my early days, I wandered the Northwest quadrant and admired the brick walls that read “FURNITURE” or “GLASSWARE” or “CURED HAMS,” in coats of paint now a century or more old. I fell in love with the layers of life in loft apartments and coffee shops that had once been warehouses and rolling mills. Rust and minerals appeared like flecks of salt and pepper in the once-blonde buildings. If cities are people then my Portland is Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren, a headstrong woman aging gracefully. I marveled at the city’s visible history, and how foreign it all was to me.

Portland’s notorious rain didn’t bother me, that first season or any that have come after. In fact, I remember exploring those early months, confused at how the pavement was always wet but it rarely seemed to actually be raining. I didn’t drive a car and didn’t buy an umbrella. The first time I was caught in an unexpected downpour, I arrived home out of breath, less from running there than from a fit of laughter sparked by an elderly man who, also soaked to the bone, had smiled at me conspiratorially and jumped into a puddle. The strangers you pass in a Portland downpour will meet your eyes and smirk, as if sharing a secret no one in their cars or sitting warm at home knows: this is holy water! Portland rain is the fountain of youth! People go to outdoor concerts and farmers markets in stormy weather; no one melts. There is a too-obvious metaphor here about rain and the washing clean of the past, and it was not lost on me that first spring up north.

+

My mother grew up in Santa Rosa, a town about a half hour from where I was raised. The details of her childhood are mostly a blur to me, but I know it was bad enough that the moment she turned 18, she took the first one-way ticket she could find out of town. This ticket came in the form of a wedding and a soon-to-become abusive husband. They took off in his Chevy Nomad and drove as far east as possible. Shortly after, she divorced him, became a model, and moved into a “flat” with her photographer boyfriend, “Chigger.”

We tend to grow up believing that our parents’ lives began when ours did. I learned early enough, though, that my mom’s life did not start because I came into it. Like a cat, she had fallen into one after another, landing effortlessly on her feet with each transition.

In rapid succession she morphed from model to rock band groupie, to hippie flower-child, to rootless traveler, moving back and forth from coast to coast and everywhere in between. Eventually, she got her high school diploma, and then entered an academic phase, working toward a PhD in language studies. She met my father in her academic phase. The my-father phase lasted about five years, toward the end of which she transitioned into the person I know: my mother.

My great-grandparents owned a plot of wild, naked land not far from Santa Rosa, where the sky at night is clear and cloudless, where the stars shine brighter than anywhere I’ve ever been. In that valley, even the darkest dark night glows. Shortly after I was born, they announced that they would be selling the property, and rather than see it sold off, my mom and her brother pooled their finances and bought it. My mother once again drove coast to coast, this time east to west, this time with a toddler and a nearly-newborn baby to keep her company. I didn’t know a father was a thing until many years later.

When I was fifteen, dating my first boyfriend and feeling the beginnings of what I thought might be love, I asked my mom why she’d left him. We were sitting in the living room, which looked out through two French doors to the back porch, and beyond that, the mountainside. “In all my life, when everything else around me came and went or fell apart, the view from this spot was the only thing that hadn’t changed since I was a little girl. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing that.” At the time, I couldn’t understand how a piece of property could be more important than a person. I hadn’t yet learned how lucky I was to have something in my life that stable, an idea of a childhood home that never faltered, was never threatened. I had not yet learned how easily people change.

When I was sixteen, my brother went to college and mom and I were left alone. We broke bad fast; a volatile combination of puberty and menopause. For three years we lived like lionesses, either at each other’s throats or silently stalking around the house, avoiding interaction. I became nocturnal. I would check for her bedroom light on my way up the driveway late at night, and if it was still on, I would sometimes park halfway down the gravel road and wait for it to go black.

by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson

I wanted to blame her. For what? Anything. Everything. My father’s absence. Who I’d become: unaffectionate, cold, guarded. For my growing inability to distinguish between two things that should be opposite; love and loneliness, for example.

After high school, when I began to understand that my mother was depressed, and deeply so, I shifted blame to my father, for anything, everything. Just before moving to Portland, he was in San Francisco for a conference and I met him for coffee, seeing his face for maybe the fifth time since babyhood. At the time, my mother was sick and I was brave. I wanted to hate him. I wanted to make him defend himself.

What I took away from that visit is this: my mother wanted my father to follow her, and he wanted her to stay. But she didn’t ask him to follow, and he didn’t ask her to stay, and they both remained hurt over it for a long time. Maybe forever, the ghosts of that past life lingering throughout every life that came after. Her children are sometimes comforting, and sometimes a painful reminder of that man. When I wanted to be cruel, I knew how his last name or the eyebrows I inherited from him, held hard and fast like a dare, could cut her to the bone.

If I have learned anything valuable about relationships from the lack of my parents’, it is to avoid the lasting pain of this pitfall at all costs. It is that you can’t be mad at another person for not giving you something you never asked for.

+ 

When I was looking at colleges, my mom and I traveled to the east coast. We visited Boston, where she took me to the Harvard stacks and told me about sneaking in to read Dickens and law books, long before she went back to school. In New York, we got lattes at a café on the street where she’d gone on her first date with my father. The bar they’d gone to was no longer there, but I could feel her remembering it hard enough that it might as well have been. It was summer and her memories stuck to the inside of my windpipe like humidity; these places were supposed to be new to me, but everywhere we went was already a piece of my history. Her nostalgia made me claustrophobic.

After college, I moved to San Francisco. When my mother visited, I tried to show her around my neighborhood but every street corner was already special. I would start a story and she’d finish it. I know these stories were an opportunity, an attempt she was making to bond, but it took the excitement out of the place for me. Everywhere I went seemed to have been my mother’s home before she was my mother. I felt unoriginal, but also guilty. I felt like I was perpetually taking things that had once belonged to her: the plain wedding band I wear on my right index finger, her grey cowl-neck sweater, city after city, youth.

by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson

People often leave a place to escape their own memories, sick of standing on first kiss street corners or having breakup flashbacks on the bus route by an ex-boyfriend’s house. This was part of leaving California for me, but the appeal of Portland specifically was that I had no past there, even, especially, before my own. My mother had never been. The first time she visited, I walked her through the Rose Garden and Arboretum, took her to my favorite breakfast spot, found a Thai restaurant for dinner where neither of us had ever eaten. All weekend she nodded and smiled. She asked questions she didn’t already have answers for.

+

Months after my grandmother died, my mom was shipped a box of old browning photographs, a sewing machine, and a recipe for that too-dense, too-rich chocolate cake Grammere had made every Christmas. My mom hated chocolate and had hated that cake. She emitted a sort of scoffing laugh when she found the recipe, and then her shoulder-shaking turned to crumbling as she pored and cried over the pictures, called in sick to work, had someone pick my brother and I up for school, didn’t leave the house for weeks.

A big black folder lived under the bed in the study with some of the prints from when she was modeling. In it, there were dozens of proof sheets and a few almost life-size black and white headshots, her skin grey and smooth and elegant. After Grammere died, I stole one of the photos.  My mom is in a garden and, even caught in the middle of a head-thrown-back laugh, there is a sadness in her face that I’ve sometimes been told is in mine as well.

Years later, I was helping my brother move and I found another of the photos, pressed between the pages of an atlas like a delicate flower. My mother is in an empty room, sitting on a wooden chair and looking at the camera, not smiling but seemingly content, like she is remembering something happy. I didn’t bring it up but wondered when he’d taken it. I wonder when he decided he didn’t want someone else to choose which pictures he would get one day, which to send through the mail in a repurposed shoebox.

+

In Portland, I became friends with a woman who I consider to be one of my platonic soul mates. To say that Sondra always seems to know the right thing to say wouldn’t do her justice. She doesn’t “just know” the right thing to say, as if to imply that it comes easily, but she works hard to get to it. She listens, and reads people, and knows how to balance being honest and kind.

When we had known each other a few months, Sondra and I got together for a craft night. The holidays were approaching and she’d read about a way to weave magazine pages into bowls that could be given as Christmas presents. I came with a notebook, planning to write.

“Would you read me something?” Sondra asked as we settled onto the living room floor. I couldn’t remember the last person I’d read out loud to, the last time I’d even read out loud, but I said yes. I flipped through the notebook, found an old favorite, and then before I knew it I had read three pieces, five, nine. Somewhere in the middle, tears started streaming down my face.

In the silence after I finished, Sondra rose from the floor, hugged her shoulders around mine and whispered one simple sentence, five magnificent words into my ear before going to the kitchen to start dinner.

“You are not your mother.” 

by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson

I didn’t even realize the piece I’d read had been about my mother, didn’t really even know when I had started crying or why, but there it was. It’s what I’d been running from. It’s why I had come to Portland – to find that out, or prove it to myself, or both.

+

If Portland is a woman, she is like my mom. She goes to a grey resting place between seasons, a melancholy in her face even in the middle of a head-thrown back laugh. She smiles not that often, but when she does, it’s like August; it lights up the room. When she smiles, you forget everything that’s come before that moment and fall in love with her, and you forgive her, over and over again.

One Thanksgiving, my mom let me borrow one of her favorite sweaters, an oversized cowl-neck the color of six a.m. in September. I kept it long after the holiday, brought it with me when I moved to Portland. When she visited, she asked about it, having seen me wearing it in a photo a few weeks before. In true Capricorn passive aggressive fashion, I didn’t admit to having it, but snuck it back into her suitcase the night before she left.

The last time I saw her I was walking away from a Portland MAX station, where she was waiting for the train to the airport. My mother pulled the grey sweater she’d found in her bag that morning over her head, and disappeared into the sky. It started to rain.

Josiane Curtis is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Portland. She last wrote in these pages about leaving San Francisco. You can find her twitter here. You can find her website here.

Paintings by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson.

"Clair de Lune" - Flight Facilities (mp3)