Hate to see u go, love to watch u leave

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I think what I will miss most about Washington, once I leave at 3pm, is the smell of the sea. I see it like two sides of a coin being here, I see all the ugliness, the sparseness, the newness and suburban smears of capitalism, like crusty old shit stains. But once you’re beyond even the rural entrails of the city and it’s just you and the bearded forests, spired mountains and crabby shores of the sea, all of which feel like old friends, returning to Seattle begins to feel different. I cease to notice it’s imperfections as a city because it ceases to be a destination in of itself, instead transmuting into something that holds you between the time Out There. And Out There might actually be the point of it all.

When I’m Out There all my joy becomes external. I stop being something perceivable or reflectable or improvable and become a conglomeration of limbs, imbibing a complex network of life that is indifferent to my petty whims. Warm dirt and spiders and the birds that eat them and the rocks they sit on. Everything about me begins to matter less - my thoughts, my words, my fears, my desires. There is such freedom in that. To be a pair of eyes and mouth and nose and two good strong legs. To know such a space will be finished with you long before it bends its neck, before it will even blink. To it, you will always be worthless, and within that is a great weightlessness.

Leaving Washington has a nice ache to it, reminding me of the great joys of a net of friends who can see you for all that you are, both that which is magical and the profound flaws. To be seen, to be known. To have something to return to over and over. To spend time together even when it is wordless, or cranky, or tearstained. I have always been lucky in love.

Yes, all my women, hurtling through the trees together, whooping and alive, dirty, earthen, gasping in the cold water, laughing in a house in which I do not need ask where the spoons live, or if I may borrow milk from the fridge, or yes also sitting on a terrace for hours and hours, watching the planes go by and discussing the finer points of all that we are and have been, feeling how sturdy everything we have made is.

I have almost been gone a year, a year which should feel like nothing but has contained so much, and while the world changes around us, the clench of love remains the same. I love Washington like a garden I planted long ago, and is now so very ripe with fruit.

While I am learning to love the East Coast too, its garbagio smell and denseness and the crush of endless entertainment, the spectrum of humanity pressed up against each other like so many flowers in a bouquet, I keep checking the road behind me and feel great comfort in finding it as a lovely as I left it, my capacity for love, even when simultaneous, even when in conflict with one another, to be ever expanding.

Xoxo

Swamp Hag