Goodbye Portland

I'm listening to the melancholic organ line in the background of Justin Townes Earle's plaintive "Midnight at the movies" as I think about the past few weeks. I've traveled through Seattle and Portland with Andrew, showing him bits of me, parts of the places that have informed my life.

Portland no longer feels like home, although the verdant forests along the 205 stretch of highway into Oregon City welcomed me back to friends. I was taken aback about how the line between city and country was so vague in the outlying parts of metro Portland's cities.

My eyes are new to Portland, as I haven't seen it in over a year, and as I've just come from LA and Seattle, I see how truly tiny the downtown is. How truly tiny the city is. No wonder then, that in my senior year, before I'd even graduated and moved out, I felt the restlessness creeping up inside me. How did Portland hold me for a year? I'm someone who, on some days, finds the mass sprawl of LA boring.

Returning to University of Portland, walking around campus in the midst of spring time beauty, I hoped for it to capture me in some way. But it didn't. I didn't feel the emotional tug on my heart that I had expected even when I visited the spot on the bluff, facing the St Johns Bridge where I would look out wistfully to the river, remembering it as the place where I had a bittersweet goodbye kiss. The place where I wrote about my feelings, wrote about my fears, hopes, my changing life after graduation.

All I felt was a strange numbness, as if all the pain and all the happiness and pathos of the past years has dissipated, leaving UP when I did, so that now when I return, there is nothing but new people and new students. UP, and Portland, is no longer my place, and as it surprises me, it feels right too.

Thanks to Andrew's good job, vacation pay, and something called my federal income tax return, I was able to witness two people, a dear friend of mine and her fiance, join hands in marriage. This time last year I was dating someone who was not interested in a relationship and my friends and I were uncommitted to men. Now, I find myself in a relationship I thought could never exist, one friend married, the other engaged. What a difference a year makes.

And yet, I haven't really changed. I'm still too hard on myself, still restless and itching for adventure. Still somewhere between faith and doubt, anxiety and calmness and contentment and existential angst.