In an attempt to close this chapter better than my last one, process current events, and beef up for an active, engaged life, I wrote and now share this letter.
Dear Portland,
On the day I say goodbye to you, the world is on fire. Houston rises from rubble and another storm taunts the beleaguered Gulf. Korea, where my parents' love conceived me, reels from the shock of the North's hydrogen bomb test. Millions of cars and their idling exhaust spin upwards over the Coast Range, back to your sprawl from a Labor Day weekend on the beach. I tried to jog the dogs this morning, but ash from the sky joined my dandruff, and an iron claw grabbed my lungs. Wildfire has turned the air gray and the light yellow across the state as it consumes the growth of the most severe winter since 1950. And my friends are downtown, making the will of the people known about the Commander-in-Chief's DACA decision. They will be awake tonight, organizing around the clock to protect their families and homes from the aftermath, while I will be awake in an attic with a broken air conditioning after a burning 100 degree day. The filter is clogged with ash.
It can be said that the world is not well; it is on fire. Perhaps it never wasn't.
I thank you today for the power you have given me that is stronger still.
I name that you're highly imperfect and worse. Some have said you are a breeding ground for false comfort, complacency, technobots, hatred. I have seen the truth in these, though I am also blind to them.
But I also name my gratitude to you. When you welcomed me home for the first time in two years, I had just left the grey sprawl of Managua in an anxious knot of unprocessed goodbyes that I don't intend to recreate. I had refused to buy lunch or dinner in the airport because I felt in my body for the first time (though I had always known) that the price was enough to feed a family for a week. I was purple from guilt and shock, and weak from hunger and insomnia.
In the backseat of my parents' car, as we crossed Fremont Bridge toward their house in the Willamette Valley, I saw the green darkness of Forest Park at nighttime, dotted by the wet steel of winter skyscrapers and Christmas lights. It was all reflected, magnified, in the Willamette below. Like a city living in a raindrop. "Is it real?" I said aloud.
"Did you hear her?" Dad said to Mom. He could barely understand me through the sobs. "I think she asked if it's real."
Thank you for being real. For feeding me food I grew from leftover glass factory lots. For late-night rides from solidarity committee meetings to salsa dancing after a 50-hour work week. For bikes and beards and beer and beets and Bigfoot. For Hood (Wy-East) and Adams (Pahtoe/Klickitat) and St. Helens (Loowit) winking white in daylight in the nearby far-away.
But thank you mostly for a sort of person I have found here. They are my rain in drought. They are gigglers and dancers and nerds and wanderers. They are prophets and diplomats and anarchists and immigrants. They are survivors of divorce, and loneliness, and cancer, and rape, and racism, and homelessness, and wars, who somehow smile at me at every encounter like I am emmanuel. I cling to them when I see the world burn. They will not stop extinguishing hate and growing life. I will not stop following them.
Amid, perhaps because of, your imperfection, you are the first place I ever called home. From your southern reaches, I saw the totality of the 2017 total solar eclipse. Behind the black moon, there was the purest white diamond. Its pulsing reminded me the universe is a body. It was the sun refusing to die, life laughing boldly on. In its darkness, we gawked and and laughed and cried and danced. Me and my friends, my leaders, the survivors.
As I make home elsewhere, for now or forever?, I touch the tapestry you have woven into my daily being. I carry with me idealism, energy, honesty, sacrifice, humility, brokenness, devotion. I believe these innocences are part of the life-in-common that will save us.
I'm now on my way toward cost curves and quantitative methods and legislative history. I've noticed that my mouth is already dry as I chew these pages. I used to call these things pointless and cowardly; the real lucha is on the streets, not in the books. I am different now, maybe for the better. With a rise-and-grind in my step, I thank you for giving me the focus to delve into the next two years. On my altar I have placed the prayer of better speaking the language of power, and better returning power to those who would save us from it.
If I don't have the privilege of calling you home again, I'll be OK.
But yours forever anyhow,
Heather Mae
P.S. For those who missed the Facebook post, here's where I'm headed next. The letter is less sexy if I admit outside this postscript I'm going two hours south.
