Last Day in Ghost World

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 I have been in Michigan for a week now, the longest stretch since I left in 2014. However, because: pandemic, I have seen no one. I have been to the store three times, I have gotten a COVID test from a mean nurse who chastened me you need to write down a local address and when I told her I didn't have a local address (she was holding my driver's license after all) spit like we care what happens in orih-GON" which made me burst into tears, which made her nice when she did the stupid test (my fifth?) and told me you did a really good job, sweetie, a really good job. I have, however, hiked and run 56.4 miles, have thought long and hard about an alternative life I could have had here, if I had been brave enough. This may be the last time I have this length of time alone. Maybe; who knows. I have listenend to YoYo Ma, taken my temperature at least 100 times (my basal temp is 96.8, my morning temp 97.8, my mid-morning temp 98.2, my evening temp 98.8 if you were wondering).  Because I am 43 and perimenopausal, I have awoken at least three nights soaked through my clothes (thank you, three glasses of wine). I have seen white tailed deer, a pileated woodpecker, white-crowned sparrows, sandhill cranes, black squirrels, seagulls, nuthatches, chickadees. Wet orange mushrooms, beeches, foredune forests, wetlands, pearly everlasting, marram grass.

I miss everyone so much. I miss Michigan. I miss Oregon so much, R. and D. and J. and our life there. Because this existence here is suspended; I don't get J., I get only a thin simulacrum of a life. What it would be if it were just me. I block everything else out, I have to. Even last year when I went to Chicago to see my mom and sister and nephew and Acorn, I did it alone. That's what I'm left feeling: the Midwest birthed me, but I must face it alone. No boy, no partner, no family. Just me. The Midwest birthed me, raised me, but for whatever reason will not hold the whole me until I can figure out a way.

But at the edges of my vision: the redolent, damp, verdant Pacific Northwest, a place I have always felt at home, even that first weekend in 2013. I have never felt so immediately and wholly at home. I forced Michigan to be inside my DNA. Portland was perhaps there already. Maybe it's because there I feel safe. At any rate, it is these moments when I am here, divorced from the people I loved here in Michigan and the Midwest, thousands of miles away from the people I love in the Pacific Northwest, that I most fully understand the way the soul can be stretched over the world, a gossamer filament, the smallest thread we can weave. The strongest.


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