Letter to Ryan

It was icy here this morning in the NW. I woke up to the news of a fully engulfed bus fire on I-5 at 85th - even on the traffic cams the freeway overpasses looked like they had been dipped in egg white, then sugared. Except for the flare of yellow where the bus was.

In the morning, I take the dog out first thing, careful on the ramp Tom built for her, frosted in the morning sometimes, sometimes just wet from rain and the bad gutters on the house. She moves slowly, stands and looks at the yard, seems to forget what she's doing there. When we come back into the house, I bend down and rub her soft ears, tell her she's a good dog, every day. She wanders back into the bedroom and I close her in with Tom for a few more hours of sleep. I shower, make tea, toast, pull things together and go out to chip the frost off my car for the long drive to work.

It feels like I'm traveling a lot these days, though it's the same 59.9 miles back and forth all the time. It's ten days into January and not a good month, already. When RGIII wrecked his already-injured knee last weekend, someone said "There are no grown-ups down there on the sidelines during NFL games", meaning someone should have benched him, but no one did. I'm being bounced against all the hard edges of adulthood every day these days, getting good at things no one wants to be good at, telling people they didn't get the job, and worse. Some times people tell me "I would hate to have your job" and I think Yeah me too, but I give a shit about there being good grown-ups in the world, and it's ok with me if I have to try to be one. Not that I succeed all the time, there are still those bad gutters on the house, after all, but sometimes people know to come to me to ask for things, to ask for help, and often I can. That doesn't make every day good but it makes the whole life good, I think.

I don't picture you on the internet much these days, and I wish I could send a letter, handwriting, paper, an envelope, some amount of stamps that I would have to look up to get right. We haven't known each other long enough for you to decipher my handwriting all that well, but we have to start somewhere, and even if you understood every individual letter, who is to say that we ever understand all the words that anyone else writes to us anyway? They are all subject to misinterpretation, like my ill-defined Rs or lazy Gs. You'd get most of it, I think, anyway.

I do picture you getting this message, reading it, and thinking, did she mean to write this to me? And yes, I did, Ryan, who used to always smell surprisingly like soap, in spite of that dirty hair. I meant to send it to my white t-shirt-wearing two-step partner, with the good eyes that are often kind of somewhere else, until they're not, and then there's that singular, unforgettable focus. We talk about that, behind your back, and love you for it.

When I woke up this morning, it was from a long dream you were in. You were back from a faraway trip, as you would be if you were here. You had brought a girl with you, someone I knew, and things weren't quite right between you. You were staying in a loft, clothes hung on pipes strung up with rope, and she had filled the pipe/rod with bathing suits, a vintage style, all one piece and embellished, some with halter necks that would criss-cross in an X over collarbones, some embroidered with small dust-colored flowers. That part was too much for you, all those bathing suits filling up the one place to hang clothes.

You and I went into town, a small one where the restaurants were all close together, so that with their doors open it was almost like they were all rooms in a house. You knew the Japanese man who ran a French restaurant, had worked for him before. We walked through the kitchen where the orders were piling up, ready to be taken out and served, but no servers were around anywhere, just the owner. For fun, you took plates out and served them for him while I waited.

Sometimes there isn't much of a point to what you write to someone else, except to say, this is where I am, somewhere always slightly unimaginable no matter how familiar a place it might be. You might remember a little what the house where I live looks like, and that tells you one thing, but you know so much more when I tell you I keep stubbing my toe on the hard furniture of being grown-up and my foot fucking hurts but sometimes you have to get up in the middle of the night in the dark to take the dog out, and if you love that dog and know she won't last forever, even that one little painful duty is a kind of honor and something you'll miss when she's gone.

That is to say, life back here is hard and sweet and you and I had a funny friendship that existed in a space so undefined and out of place that it seems right to send you something random, because also, you are on the road, and who knows what you will see next, there is always surprise and I hope for that for you always.

Love to you,
H