Metaphor Cocktail

Since I wrote last week it hasn't stopped being weird walking around Seattle and living life as though nothing had changed.  However, this time around I feel I'm much more up to the task of putting these feelings down into words.  I haven't even been back in Seattle yet a month, and I'm trying to cut myself some slack in making sense of what at once seems so familiar and yet is so out of place.  But some of my thoughts have started to come together and I'm hopeful that I can actually express them in a constructive way rather than going on a self-righteous rant (as fun as those are).  In any case, I'm going to give it my best shot.  At worst, I'm just talking to myself right now and this post will sit as a draft in the land of misfit posts along with all the rest I've come up with in the past couple of weeks that never seemed to go anywhere. 

Right now I'm trying to think about being back in Seattle as its own experience removed from the morass of anger, frustration, despair and confusion that's all knotted together in being forced from Japan by the UW administration, and also removed from the much larger issue of the actual earthquake and the relief effort.  It's hard to try to pull things apart like this; indeed, it's much like my biggest complaint about political scientists in arbitrarily declaring something a variable as though it has no context or connection to the world around it.  But even in knowing this, I can't shake the feeling that there's something fundamentally and uniquely strange about the fact of me being in Seattle again.  I think I have in some part figured out, and a lot of it has to do with the way I have been remembering and even reliving my best mistakes.

For me, there are some days I go around Seattle and I feel haunted.  I am haunted by the memory of a certain place, of a time, of the people, and of my own emotions.  What sets my head spinning is the fact that a fair number of these are the shades of good memories.  I can almost feel how happy I was, and then that's when the teeth sink in.  Simultaneously I know these were feeling that weren't going to last.  Whenever I go past my old running route near Ravenna and Cowen Park, I can almost feel myself breathing the cold, damp air from those first few runs I took soon after graduate school had started.  There was hope mixed in in that air; I remember that I felt as though I had finally made a good decision, that I was actually going somewhere rather than circling around the cul-de-sac of yet another dead-end job.  But now with the way I remembering graduate school - bitter competition, bitter disappointment, and now the bitter pill of student debt - I want that freshness back.  Call if naivete if you will, but sometimes being as cynical as I am and being constantly reminded of how I wound up this way is fucking obnoxious.

It can be as simple as taking a trip from place A to place B and I'll find myself lost in thought, remembering where I was and who I was.  I think this may have come up at some point in the course of my ramblings, but Seattle was an important growing experience for me in many ways.  Before I moved from New York in September of 2008, I was not leading the happy hour charge; when I wasn't at work, I was usually at home and had absolutely no intention of going out in search of people.  I was perfectly content to be by myself; in many ways, I preferred to be by myself and resented anyone who tried to upset that status quo.  Likewise, I didn't expect that people wanted to spend any time with me, so when I moved out in 2008 I didn't hope to make more than a couple of friends to keep me from being completely on my own.  But as time passed, I found that not only did people want to have me around, I also wanted to be around them.  I suffered from a fair amount of social anxiety through high school and college that made me afraid of groups of people, and it was a lot easier to be withdrawn than to deal with the uncertainty and distress of putting myself out there.  What I mean to say with all of this is that when I was going out in Seattle, hitting up the bars and generally running amok, it was really the first time I was doing any of that.  Hence why I think every place I've been here in Seattle is so saturated in memory:  I had no barometer and the only experiences I had to compare with were me sitting at home on a Friday night playing Rise of Nations II (this is also why I refuse to buy computer or video games... it's a slippery slope).  These were entirely new interactions, exchanges, and emotions and basically a road map of Seattle has become a road map of my memory and personal growth.

So a trip around Seattle here for me is rarely so simple as going from home to the UW campus, or campus out for the evening.  Hell, this is my first time I've lived in Capitol Hill, but I've ridden the 49 (the bus that cuts straight through the middle of this rather colorful neighborhood) any number of times and I can recall so many details about this night out, or the person who sat next to me on the way toward wherever home was at the time.  For a more practical example, the other day I rode the 75 (if you're not at all familiar with Seattle, all of these numbers are bus routes) from Campus Parkway through campus and wound my way down toward the University Village shopping center.  I used to take the 75 to and from Sand Point the summer in between my first and second year of graduate school to and from campus when I was taking beginner's Korean.  As the bus headed down the hill past Padelford Hall toward 25th Ave, I was no longer trying to get a copy of my damn apartment key.  It was instead the summer of 2009 and maybe I was headed to U-Village to go grocery shopping, or (heh) hit up the liquor store before going out to get the 30 to go out to Queen Anne to visit Cai and Carissa.  Or the other day I was standing at 45th and University (fucking creepy bus stop, but not nearly the worst in Seattle.  I'm trying to decide whether the one between 45th and 47th on the Ave or 3rd and Pine is worse) and as I looked back toward University, I swore for a second I was waiting for someone to come around the corner to come meet me before heading out to Ballard for pub quiz.  I felt for even just a second standing there the anticipation of waiting for them, and the relief of seeing them coming around the corner toward me just as the 44 pulled up to the curb.

All of this is to say that so many places in Seattle are steeped in memory for me so as to constantly remind me of how I wound up where I am right now.  I still to this day have trouble walking around Pike Place Market because I know that the Pink Door is not too far away, site of my last good date.  I get a simultaneous rush from recalling that small victory that is soon crushed when I remember just how sour things turned some few weeks later.  It's overwhelming to be walking around trying to carry on with the here-and-now when the past is trying to catch up to you.  It fills my senses.  I grit my teeth and wish I could just forget.  It is even more of a problem when I begin to think about what I've learned and how I've changed in the process.  This exercise is even more useless now because I am currently in flux yet again and I'm not 100% on how I'm going to come out of this latest disappointment.  And let's not even start on the uncertainty of the next few months.  

The fact that I also constantly walk around with headphones only serves to intensify these experiences since certain albums and songs are associated with where I was and what I was feeling at the time.  I forever associate Etta James with the summer of 2009 because I was just coming off a particularly brutal spring quarter (which believe me, was as mean as it could have been) and I was looking for something, anything empowering to keep me going forward.  Any time I listen to Big Star's "Nighttime," I remember a particularly cold, lonely night walking around near Lake Union toward the bus home.  Or how The Replacements' "Answering Machine" first really made sense to me one afternoon walking home from campus to my room on 18th Ave and 50th.  All of this gets even more confusing when you consider the fact that I have listened to a lot of these songs for years and I often return to them when I find myself in yet another overwhelming, paralyzing or unfamiliar situation.  Each song is its own tiny emotional explosive, and it's hard to get through the day without setting one off.  

Memory is such a strange thing.  Time and place exist, but not in any conventional way.  Within the span of a three-and-a-half-minute song or ten-minute bus ride, I have been relived whole parts of my life again.  It seems like memory should be linear: where you're standing, what's behind you, and what's ahead.  But instead memory is a 3-dimensional plane where you're lucky if your experiences layer themselves neatly.  For me at least, my memories are like a 3-dimensional watercolor. I can walk through it and from a distance it seems like I can distinguish different colors and shapes.  But once I get up close, it all bleeds together and what I thought was its own entity is instead composed of what surrounds it.  Before I know it, I am colored with experience and emotion that is completely devoid of time and place.  I know reflexively when it was and where I was, but that has no bearing on who I was then and who I am now.

I'm not sure how much of this is actually making sense, but this is what I deal with on a daily basis.  I certainly learned a lot the hard way while I was here in Seattle, and though I had fun doing it, I think there's a part of me that expected to move on to the next phase when I said good-bye to all of this last year.  I'm not so naive as to believe that life breaks itself in clean lines and that every experience has a conclusive end, but to be suddenly thrown back into what I thought I had left behind and forced to confront the bleeding ends of the past is completely exhausting.  It's enough to take care of my day on a very surface level of finishing my homework, making dinner, running and going out and being social; ghostbusting and exorcising my own demons is just above and beyond right now.

And of course, I also have to live with the fact that every time I turn a corner I feel like I should see this in front of me:

Then my heart breaks all over again.