within proximity of the sea

I am home. Or what is my home . Or what was my home, has been for half my life. There are a lot of flowers in Portland, but there is no ocean and there are no headlands. At what point do you trade beauty for practicality, at what point do you sacrifice for four walls and perhaps a garden to call your very fucking own, it's more than tempting, it's fear inducing, it's happening.... I met with a mortgage broker this morning and words were bandied about that I half understood on a theoretical level, but none that I could comprehend that are in direct correlation to my vocabulary, but a half an hour later, bursting with tepid office coffee and to my complete astonishment they told me I was approved for a loan. Then I fell out of my chair and fled to the loo.

We, my parents and my brother and I, combed the city in search of signs, condos and houses and town houses, in varying states of awesomeness and disrepair. We got tired, we got overwhelmed, we got giddy, we sniped and we fought. One day we saw houses when I was desperately hung-over well past my tits and I thought I'd go ahead and puke if I had to trade pleasanteries with another listing agent. I close my eyes, I see houses streaming past.

Change is something that has always been visualized as something vaguely beyond execution, something to pay lip service to, then one fine day you have been driving all day, and have got hung up by the weird ass paint jobs in Portland and the proliferation of MAKE YOUR EYES BLEED reds that all living rooms seem to be painted and have been thoroughly intoxicated by the bright bursts of rhodedendron and the virtuous pretty pinks of the dogwood stretching over streets, it's lush, drunkenly lush, and everyone is weirdly friendly and considerate, and the food is really good.

It's a perfect fit on so many levels, it's just not here.

I was tracking the coast from the airplane, the coves and the mouths of rivers that I know, this beach where I was with X, and on that day when I was with X, and the day we slid down the river and drank rose from the bottle, they are only memories after all, and I would be perfectly free if I could just divorce locale from my identity.

I am suprised at my mousiness, all these things I had thought I had put well behind me, have come surging into my waking thoughts, I am all aswhirl, desperate to keep pieces of me from leaking out beyond the perimeters -- which did not keep from having a complete and total melt down in front of my brother and his future wife (see below) after an evening of way too much wine followed by a couple of doses of tequila.... oh but it is tempting the theoretical house, and the theoretical garden to contain flowers and tomatoes and containing the theoretical puppy, and I might theoretcally sing with my brother's band, when I come home from my theoretically awesome job, and afterwards I might get theoretically laid by the theoretically fantastic man who is gainfully employed and does not sport a whispy theoretical beard. What is there to theoretically weep over, yet I have.