anti:freeze

my backyard, shot with the lomo

Sometimes I watch the trains pull into Union Station, and I wonder what would happen if I ran down to the ticket counter and booked a seat. No note. No plans. No credit card. No time to think about consequences.

Other times I think about the tracks, and how I could follow the rails almost anywhere, no need for a map. I could walk all the way to Iowa, back to the trestle where I went to be alone and write in my notebooks as a kid, where I used to lie down and stare at the sky, listening to the trickling creek, feeling the intersection of kinetic and potential. I used to think for hours about the grace and elegance of trains, how they followed such perfect paths, and how my duct-taped Chuck Taylors had no right to tip-toe on the ties or balance on the metal rails. Those rails were meant for something more forceful, more powerful and dangerous, than I could ever be. They held the train to its path. I had to hold myself.

When I was a kid, my best friend lived right down the street, and he would stand outside my screen door dribbling his basketball, waiting for me to join him, or skid his bicycle to a stop at the top of our driveway. He didn't have to knock or ring the bell.

We played together every day, riding our bicycles up and down the street, or crawling close to the curbs, searching for clues to solve some imagined mystery. When we found a shoelace or paper, we placed it in a plastic bag, labeled it, and looked at it under my toy microscope - one of those shiny red, plastic models you find in gift shops or discount stores. We used tweezers to remove items from their bags, then affixed them to a slide and took turns looking through the lens.

Sometime around middle school, we stopped hanging out. His friends were picking on him for hanging out with a girl - especially a white girl - and the first traces of my punk-rebel self were emerging. By highschool, we stopped saying hello in the hallways.

But here's what gets me: There had to be a last day, and a last moment, when I walked away from his door and never went back. And I can't remember it.

Constant says:

"The liberation of behaviour requires a social space that is labyrinthine, but at the same time continually subject to modification. There will no longer be any centre to be reached, but instead an infinite number of moving centres. There will no longer be any chance of getting off track in the sense of getting lost, but rather in the more positive sense of finding previously uknown paths . . . I call this uninterrupted process of creation and destruction the 'dynamic labyrinth.'"

I am thinking about sound, and how it travels into our minds and memories through the labyrinthine structures in our ears. How much is created and destroyed? And does it lead us down previously unknown paths?.

I thought about taking this picture for a long time. Every time I walked by, I remembered the old Bromo-Selzer advertisement across the street, painted over with drab beige so that no one can see it. How long before Fire Apparatus was gone, too?

At the bus stop nearby, I heard someone say, "Why the hell would anyone take a picture of that?"

That made me want to take it even more.

Every year around this time, I flip through newsstand magazines and look at the Father's Day advertisements - watches, ties, new drills and saws, all with pictures of smiling dads. I never buy any of it.

This morning I flew from Portland to Los Angeles, for my final residency at Antioch University. By June 30th, I will have my MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and I'm sad to think about turning in my thesis; disappointed to imagine it bound in black leather and slid onto a shelf at the Antioch library, where my essays will collect dust for years to come.

But what I'm thinking about now is my flight - the way Los Angeles looked from the air, stretching out for miles. I have this fantasy of moving here, just to see if I can do it. It's the ultimate challenge - a woman who doesn't even know how to drive, who is terrified of cars, making it in the City of Angels.

I remember late nights in LAX terminals, and how Los Angeles looked from the night sky as my flights took off - like someone spilled champagne all over the desert. Today, as my plane descended through smog into bright afternoon sunshine, the city looked more ordered and rational, all the blocks lined up straight, all the corners right angles.

Did I mention that my airplane was filled with missionaries, on their way to Lima, Peru? I sat next to one of them, and she was probably the nicest person I have ever met. I hope she's sleeping now, as she soars over South America. She was very tired, and very nervous about her first trip to a foreign land, where she plans to take poor children to camp and help change the world. She didn't even mind my dreads.

Since I arrived in Los Angeles, the sky has been overcast, the wind chilly, the mornings wet and grey. I am taking this as a sign.

When I arrived in Los Angeles last week, I was determined not to hang out with other students, even the ones I had admired a long time. I planned to attend readings by myself, eat cheap take-out in my hotel room, file my paperwork, and skip out on graduation. That was before I had a seizure. D. rode along in the ambulance, holding my hand the whole way. When the paramedics tried to insert an IV and infuse me with high doses of anti-seizure medication, she made them untie the tournequet. At that point, I was fully aware of what was happening, but unable to talk. There is a certain kind of intimacy in letting someone talk for you, and knowing she is getting it right. Getting you right.

In the short course of one week, I consider D. a good friend.

I still skipped out on graduation.

But why not hang out with the other students? Why skip graduation? A lot of people have asked me these questions.

It has to do with knowing how much I can take, how many people I can stand to miss. When you meet someone only briefly, they are forever suspended in potential. You can never know them as deeply as you desire. And this is sometimes harder than saying goodbye to old friends. Not enough memories to outweigh the absence. You can't remember the exact shape of their chins or noses, or the designs on their blouses, the color of their irises.

I am thinking now of the way my friend rolled a small piece of paper and held it between his fingers, like a cigarette. Even after fifteen years, he still longs for the sensation of smoking, the way it gives you something to hold in your hands, all the little objects associated with it - ash trays, lighters, special paper. He held the paper there a long time, as he sipped his Sierra Nevada and talked. That's exactly the kind of absence I mean.