I have words washed out to sea. Words ushered quietly from my lips to my fingertips, waiting patiently for the right tide, for the moon to bring my stories alive.

I have words being reviewed, words accepted and words rejected, and I’m clinging to my favorite lines, fighting for them, and it feels strange and new and exhilaratingly infuriating, this tug-of-war of wills and how the slightest bit of caving can make me feel like I’m flirting with abandoning the sanctity of a story. As it turns out, I’m protective of my phrases, perhaps too much so, and so I’m learning when to stand my ground and when to let the ground go tumbling out from underneath me and I’m wondering if catapulting my words into the eyes of impartial third-parties will ever feel even slightly comfortable. Right now it mostly feels like every inch of me splayed open in front of scrutinizing strangers, my voice quiet while my words chatter nervously, naked and vulnerable and waiting to be torn asunder should they ramble or run-on or pause for too long.

————-

Twice a week we saunter to sleep before 9pm, invite our dreams to come early so we can rise and add the sound of our feet flying over ice and snow to dark moonlit hours otherwise devoid of all sound, save for the quiet and yet unmistakable hopeful humming of a day just breaking, all consciousness and worry still soundly sleeping, nothing more alive than the blank slate creeping across butterscotch hills laden with promise as long as the trails we traipse, eyes blown open by exhilarating cold, wind dancing across our eyelids. In these pre-dawn hours there is not light enough for worry; to-do lists aren’t welcome here, can’t compete with the peace of legs turning over and over and over still, arms pumping, hot breath steaming in front of faces softly waking, happily star-gazing. I love these mornings best because at 4am there is only the present tense and it’s stunning and I like to think about him climbing and careening down silhouetted ridge-lines above me, his legs warm and loose now and miles ahead of mine, his momentum pulling me ever forward like a conveyer belt of dirt and rock and sagebrush, like the magnetic mountains pull him to them, up and up and higher still.

————-

Yesterday morning I met a hawk on my way into my favorite coffee shop and he let me stand next to him for multiple minutes and I smiled as I admired his stately stance and his dappled rust-red breast and he looked at me with clear eyes (full hearts, can’t lose) and reminded me I’d dreamed of an eagle the night prior and since then I haven’t stopped thinking about flying.

————-

I’ve been spending the bulk of my days reading and writing and working and running and laughing and being happily highly caffeinated. I collect slivers of sunlight for less bright days, but in this valley of apples I’ve found I never have to wait too long for the light to come rushing back if ever it’s gone. The sun comes to dance here almost daily, giddily cascading, cannonballing, catapulting itself into windows and foothills and upturned faces. Soon enough with prolonged light warmth too will come skipping, clipping winter’s frosty heels, and already I can feel the gentle touch of spring soft and sure and green against my skin. Already I can hear fingers reaching for the edge of a page where another chapter’s ended, and another’s about to begin.

It began simply. A direct message on Twitter first, followed by texts; those texts, in turn, begat plans. With those plans came anxiety and apprehension – I didn’t know you, not your face or your voice or anything else, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to – but also something exciting, a strange and unexpected hope hovering quietly on the horizon. And then we met, conversed and laughed oh so easily, and hours bled across hours. (Evaporating time would become a recurring phenomenon for us.) Leaves boughed low with the brilliant yellow-green of growth, the trail we were traipsing just muddy enough that we each brought a bit of it with us into the evening. An afternoon turned into three days. And then you left.

You came, and then you left. Physically, anyway. You left a piece of yourself here, perhaps wholly unintentionally at first, but daily tethered were we by texts, emails, phone calls when you weren’t sure you could or wanted to keep going, when you wanted to hear my voice, when you wanted to pretend to be upset I was standing with my feet in the Pacific and you weren’t.

But ride off, you did – as you had to, and as I was excited for you to, even as I realized missing you had already most likely become inevitable. Pushed and pulled pedals through the miles of fatigue you insisted on spending yourself on, losing yourself in – and that was your summer. My summer was likewise a blur – of legs treading trails, ogling waterfalls, embracing a new level of busy, but also laden with anticipation, this adorable pterodactyl niece on the way, training for races I wasn’t sure I could really run, a friendship steadily deepening with daily exchanges, so many changes on the horizon.

Some things impending don’t need a name, but we tried anyway: a white whale, an albatross, separate souls adrift in the same sea. Writers both, we’d each our own heads to lose ourselves in with little effort. I tried to think it was nothing, knew it was something; you said you weren’t sure it could be anything, even as you routinely acted as if it were everything.

We staged a great road trip adventure (complete with exclaiming acronym!) and snagged weekends thereafter, kidnapped them from our respective schedules. I fell in love with a small town nestled beneath some of the most stunning mountains I’ve ever seen, and you kept finding ways to keep me there. Thanksgiving became a three-week festivity, lingering nearly to Christmas. Your landlord joked I’d moved in; my friends wondered if I was ever coming back to Portland. What had been a someday, maybe fell instead toward when?

I came home – or to what has these past four years been home – and you followed only a few days later. Co-workers were met, and then a few weeks later, family introduced. Packing became my daily evening ritual; each box sealed was another step from before to after, the unsteady in-between-times past to this happily unwritten present: exciting new terrain to navigate and explore. There are plenty of questions, yes, but it seems like maybe there are just as many answers, even if we haven’t yet unearthed all the right words for them.

The change of address forms are through; this week is my last here, though I’ll surely be back to visit my beloved and eccentric Portlandia, to hug the bodies belonging to the faces of those I can count on missing terribly, to frequent favorite haunts and all the best coffee shops.

In a week, I’ll again be a Washingtonian, nearer those snowy peaks and cold mountain lakes. In a week, I’ll have traded the bustling city streets of Portland for the hard-packed and secluded trails of Wenatchee foothills. In a week, I’ll have traded this stretch of Columbia for that. In a week, I’ll be with you – and for the first time, I won’t just be visiting.

Until today I haven’t known where, exactly, to begin. And so quiet this space has mostly been because some beginnings are tricky. Sometimes it’s quite impossible to denote where something ended and something else entirely began.

I’m not going to be able to tell you everything, but then the best stories never really do, do they?

(That’s not a trick question. I promise they don’t.)

(Unless the story was penned by Henry James, in which case he probably really IS going to tell you everything. And you’re probably going to want to break all of his fingers by the time you reach page 500.)

———-

Before Thanksgiving I drove from Portland to San Mateo and back in a single weekend* to give Iggy a better home. He traded a one-bedroom apartment he was forced to occupy mostly alone while I worked and worked and worked some more for a house near the beach with a sun-soaked yard and multiple laps to occupy at all hours of the day and night.

I know how many of you appreciated and loved him, and anyone that ever met Iggy can attest to how surely he loved you right back, so routinely did he nearly asphyxiate himself out of sheer excitement whenever anyone walked through the front door. Letting him go remains one of the most emotionally challenging decisions I’ve ever made, and yet one of the easiest, too.

I didn’t talk publicly about my decision or the trip until it had already begun, and while it certainly might have looked abrupt from the outset (most decisions do when you’re not privy to the emotional or physical backstory), it was a decision a long while in the making, and the best for all parties involved, but most especially for Iggy.

I held him close the entire trip, paid attention to how and why I would miss him, took an excessive amount of pictures. We ran in circles at rest stops and made new friends in San Francisco and fell asleep listening to Pacific waves cresting and crashing steps away from a tent I pitched at midnight in Half Moon Bay. Like so many mornings prior, I awoke with a snoring pug curled against the small of my back.

The day after I said goodbye I started sobbing mid-run, still in San Mateo, sun warm on my face, the San Francisco Bay in front of me so bright and beautifully blue. Two days later I found this picture in my inbox, taken after Iggy’s first walk in his new SoCal city, and I haven’t cried since.

*Not at all recommended. Unless of course you have an Erin to play co-pilot, and a Hans and a Jen and a Matt for triple-team text support, and another Jen to play gracious hostess/distractor/non-judger as you start crying while petting her boyfriend’s dog.

———-

If you’re good at inference reading, you’ve probably already surmised this isn’t the only story I’m going to tell you. But it’s the only story I’m going to tell you today.

Tune in tomorrow (or maybe the next day) for more radical life changes!

This week I’ve been finding pieces of writing long lost and forgotten. Unearthing words belonging to me, and words penned by some of my favorite of all literary voices, collected and saved and scrawled excitedly on pages littered with foggy memories of past lives, obscured now in light of all that was and is and is to come.

Of the words not belonging to me, Lucille Clifton’s were the ones I found most often, recounted in notebook after notebook, or inked on napkins from memory during a particularly quiet night behind the bar. It makes sense I would find her again now, as I always do when I’m feeling quiet with so much to say. Her poems never cease to pour themselves into me, make me want to tell taller, stronger, better stories.

And stories for you I certainly have. As soon as I can find them all.

In the meantime, I’ll let Clifton do the talking, especially because “further note to clark” is perhaps my favorite of all her poems. One of them, anyway.

———-

further note to clark

do you now how hard it is for me?
do you know what you’re asking?

what i can promise to be is water,
water plain and direct as Niagara.
unsparing of myself, unsparing of
the cliff i batter, but also unsparing
of you, tourist. the question for me is
how long can i cling to this edge?
the question for you is
what have you ever traveled toward
more than your own safety?

I’m collecting stories about the apartment window filled with small elephant figurines along one of my favorite walking routes. So many trunks standing side-by-side and none of them alive.

I’m collecting the surprisingly sweet scent of roses that shouldn’t still be blooming. Their light pink petals and aroma daily chilled but unmistakably fragrant.

I’m collecting hill-infested streets, cataloging them to keep them close always, to remember the way they push and pull at the breath in my chest, the way they make my legs shake in anticipation of reaching one of their playing-hard-to-get crests.

I’m collecting looks you give me when you think my attention is busy being corralled elsewhere. I pretend I can’t see, climb slowly, stay rock steady. (Don’t worry; your secret’s safe with me.)

I’m collecting trees, so many trees imbibed with intoxicating fall hues. Reds and yellows and oranges so vibrant they make rowdy noises when you catch them in the light just right. They cheer and scream and sing of renewal and growth and death-bringing-life.

I’m collecting hopelessness, so I can set it on fire. Doubt, so I can devour it.

I’m collecting quiet moments, to save for noisy laters. So much change on the horizon, and all of it welcome, sweetly peppered with seeds of mysterious possibility to be watered; I’m going to help it grow.

I’m collecting words, so many stories I want to tell you, when the time is right. When you’re ready. When I am. Soon.

I ran the first mile in sub-8 minutes, which for my goal pace was undoubtedly ill-advised, but was also just too exhilarating to avoid. My 5K split was right around 27 minutes, which is a full 2 minutes and 29 seconds faster than the 5K I ran two weeks’ prior (Race for the Cure). Then came The Incline That Tried To Eat Me, and my pace slowed more than I wanted it to. I watched a woman being proposed to at the top, which was unexpected and amusing (Is it strange the first thing I thought was, “But wait, you’re ruining her overall race time right now”?), and then merrily crested into a steady half-mile of thrilling downhill. I made the mistake of kicking a good half-mile too early (Word to the wise: Know your course, and your mile-marker placements), but still finished right around 60 minutes.

Cayly is fast (see also: badass), and as such, was waiting for me at the finish line. Her arms were open and her smile was wide and I ran straight to her, and before I had time to say a word we were wrapped in a sweaty bear-hug, rocking back and forth and I was laughing even as I was crying, and she wouldn’t stop telling me how I looked amazing, how well I did, how proud of me she was. For the briefest of moments everything around me seemed to fall away and left standing in its place was this vivid, stunning, painfully euphoric reality that was once (as my dear friend Sizz so aptly put it) just a fuzzy dream, blurry and seemingly impossible, and now so doable as to be almost laughable. And I did laugh, a lot, and cried more, too, and then I just sat cozily with the day and reveled in the bridge I just crossed, in the truth that my body can always do more, can always be better, will–if I help it, teach it, and then just let it–triumphantly carry me through any endeavor.

I reveled in the quiet truth that, from the inside out, I’m a runner. A runner who can’t wait to push her legs farther, to make them climb higher, to send them happily careening along steeper downhills.

I suppose that quiet truth settling comfortably on my shoulders like a warm blanket shouldn’t have felt as surprising as it did Sunday. I was born into a family of runners, my dad and his five sisters all at one time avid and competitive distance-lovers (this is my aunt Nancy on 1981′s Bloomsday shirt). My sister rocked cross-country in high school, and then a half-marathon, and then a full. Watching her finish 26.2 miles here in Portland remains one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen.

Running’s in my blood, I suppose you could say, but to me it feels like a gift. One I never really knew I possessed, never really owned until yesterday, having spent the entirety of my running career up until this past year a sprinter, dashing from place to place with a lightning-is-best mentality, ever skeptical of my ability to enjoy miles stacked upon miles like beautiful pain pancakes.

Sunday I ran 6.2 miles hard, and admittedly probably not even as hard as I could have (I’m consistently finding I always have more to give even when I think I’m done), but I pushed, and never once–not even when I was convinced the incline in between miles three and four was actually an infinite loop, and as such, I was going to be relegated to running uphill for all eternity–did I want to quit. Never once did I even stop smiling, which I’m fairly certain perplexed a fair bit of people, because seriously, who is this crazy girl who seems happy about this NEVER-ENDING HILL, even as it’s clearly putting her in her place and ruining her three and four-mile pace?

Such a gift. One for which I am exceedingly thankful. One I intend to enjoy for as long as I’m able.

Which is why November 5th I’m going to run 13.1 miles, and for the very first time there isn’t a doubt in my mind I’m going to finish. There also isn’t a doubt in my mind about the sweaty bear-hug that’ll be waiting for me at the end of those wooded miles, and I can’t tell you how much knowing Cayly will have triumphantly run each mile I have, how that bear-hug after close to but hopefully still less than two hours of running will spur me forward, ever forward, even when my legs might have all but declared mutiny.

For the first time in my life I’m not weary of consecutive miles looming on the horizon; I’m eagerly anticipating them. Because these miles, they feel like freedom, feel like peace, feel like coming home.

A Marine Biologist and a Professor of English Literature. I tried to be both until a university system said it was too much work, what I wanted too different, made me choose. Beautiful decisions unfolding tenderly like fiddlehead ferns before me, showcasing a forest of promise. But the ferns don’t tell the whole story. That’s not their job. Their job is to mirror resilience. A verdant metaphor of life and longevity and YES.

The whole story is both simple and complicated, as most stories are. As choice is. Exalting one opportunity to a favorite mountaintop so often means another is relegated to the ice-cold trenches of a deep sea, destined to drift quietly in a current swirling with various nouns and half-hearted starts, ideas for zany inventions and thoughts too bold and brazen and untraditionally you to speak, sweet everythings whispered once, when you were sure he wasn’t listening, a promise you nearly shouted with your eyes when she wasn’t in the room.

Sitting in a room packed to the brim with awkwardly brilliant biologists, entomologists, analytical chemists, forestry and genetic specialists, I listen with wide eyes and a broad smile. I hear passion wafting fragrantly underneath every sentence uttered. I watch collaboration and critical thinking and problem solving with endlessly broad applications for a brighter world, and for a brief moment I find myself wondering if I made the wrong decision. I wanted to study whales and ocean currents and the mating habits of starfish as much as I wanted Yeats, Keats, Heaney, and O’Connor. And now anyone who has read Moby-Dick knows why I adore it so. Melville’s seafaring heart is something I inherently understand. He was fascinated by the sea and everything living within it we can’t and won’t ever really see. He wanted to paint the mysterious leviathan, tell its story by simply describing it. A scientist lived in his heart, but the writer was always bigger, bolder, more verbose.

I traded labs and microscopes for books splashed with the souls of kindred spirits, true. I’ve always been drawn to those who can’t be quieted, whose words have to find blank pages daily, even if said pages are never to be read, never to be heralded while they’re still breathing. The heralding matters least, I think. The truth has always been in the trying.

Words are sticky like velcro, will always find their place eventually.

Visual learning is fun. (Speaking of, there are a great deal more pictures here, from my outbound trek and my Mer-cuddling time in Minneapolis.)

Still to come: The epic return and oh, the endless stories I have, about the endless gorgeous I saw, and the endless mosquitos that oh so enthusiastically and perpetually bit me, and my car that in a moment of swoony weakness for the Grand Tetons momentarily bit the dust.

“My son forwarded to me the nice things you wrote about him…Your thoughts made a dad very proud of his son” is maybe the best compliment I’ve ever received as a direct result of my writing.

All of that to say: If you’ve written something for someone, about someone, in memory of someone, share it!

With them if you can, or with those who love them. I can guarantee you’re going to make their day when you do. Unless maybe what you wrote about them is a biting diatribe. Maybe keep that to yourself.

——————-

He was the first adult male friend of mine who didn’t talk in circles and called me beautiful and worthy on a regular basis. He was also the first mental health professional who had ever befriended me. He was hilarious and outgoing. Friends with everyone and yet he always seemed to walk alone. I would have spent all day with him, every day. I wasn’t the only one.

He was also the first relationship I ever had with a male friend that would never turn even slightly sexually tense. He was attracted to men, and had been all his life. The son of an evangelical minister, his sexual and personal freedom had been hard-wrought, and hard-won. He still maintained a working familial relationship with most of his family members, though sometimes he spoke of them the way you might speak of a pebble you’ve been forced to carry around in your pocket, something familiar and light enough, but slightly annoying, inescapable.

He was bright, intellectually razor-sharp, and deep-feeling, perpetually and intentionally burdened by the weight of his own decisions, and the weight of those he listened to for a living. I never paid him to sit in front of me, although I could have for the invaluable advice he bestowed upon me almost accidentally whenever we spoke.

To this day he remains the most honest person I have ever met. The type of honest that routinely knocks you into your own subconscious when you’re not paying attention, while you’re sitting there laughing with him, amused and engaged and merely attempting to keep up with his wit and verbal banter.

When I miscarried and was subsequently dumped by a man who the week prior had proposed marriage, he didn’t hesitate to warmly embrace me, and then moments later offered to drive to Montana to vandalize his house. I laughed through hot tears, my face buried in his shoulder, my mascara splashing quietly from my eyelashes to his dress shirt. I knew he meant it. I knew he would have driven the three-and-a-half hours across two mountain passes just to spray paint profane and holy things on the weathered sides of walls that weren’t his. Because within those walls something that belonged to him–something he understood and appreciated and loved–had been soiled. A friendship, and a woman who was once strong and self-assured, now lying in shattered pieces on an embarrassingly dirty floor.

He saw a portrait of who he wanted me to be, and saw the mess of paint I had allowed myself to be reduced to, and he never for a moment judged me on either canvas. I don’t know how he did that, how he managed to be so completely and consistently unbiased. I just know I am forever grateful for his color blindness, for his inability to see me for the wreck I was. He saw me shattered, yes, but he always believed I would rise.

I believed because he did. And for awhile that was enough.

——————-

*Post title from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and “Little Gidding” specifically.

Milestone, The First: A 5k without thinking. I just ran it. After weeks and weeks of no running. I just started running and didn’t stop until I hit 3.1, which turned into 3.5, and my legs felt amazing, and my chest didn’t feel like it was burning itself in effigy and all of that was quite unexpected, a bigger-than-baby step for this always-only-a-sprinter, and then I turned around and did it all again the next day.

Milestone, The Second: A 13-mile hike. A Saturday morning hike was my idea, but I didn’t anticipate a thirteen-miler straight out the gate. I’ve long loved hiking, have spent countless summers exploring various destinations only reachable by foot, but it’s admittedly been awhile since my weekends were consistently characterized by endless green, my feet tackling delightfully muddy trails, my eyes taking perpetual snapshots of waterfalls. I grew up playing in the woods, traipsing trails new and old from as early as I can remember, trying to get lost for hours at a time in the dense woods surrounding Priest Lake and never quite succeeding. My dad had done too good a job teaching me how to navigate the trees. I always seemed to know where I was even when I was sure I didn’t.

Among a list of eight hikes suggested by Cayly, Eagle Creek was sitting there, batting its alluring mileage at me, wooing me with promises of challenging terrain, multiple scenic pay-offs, pools I could swim. I couldn’t remember what a thirteen-mile hike looked like, but I stopped being able to sit still when I realized that was what I wanted: I wanted to tackle the longest hike on the list, and her favorite. The one requiring a 4:00am wake-up.

I nearly bounded out of bed at 4am, so excited was I to see this trail, so eagerly anticipating perpetually sweating and laughing with Cayly as we climbed and climbed and climbed. I knew before stepping foot on the trailhead I would love this hike as much as she did. Knew following a gorgeous creek for half a day was going to be a perfect way to start a Saturday. Knew I would be taking countless pictures even while realizing none of them would be able to capture the deafening beauty of standing next to a roaring waterfall while it pours itself over a 130-foot wall of rock. I knew all of that.

What surprised me was never once did I want to stop. Never once did my body feel like it couldn’t handle the mileage. If anything, my legs were telling me they wanted to go farther, wanted to keep pushing, wanted to create a new trail from the end of the old one. The waterfall-littered hike itself was breathtaking, and Cayly and I didn’t see another soul for the first two hours, unless you count the doe and her two fawns who bounded in front of us along the trail, and who we met on our way back, standing mere feet away from us this time.

It was (and no doubt will continue to be) one of my favorite days of this entire year.

Milestone, The Third: Running without music. This happened accidentally this past weekend as I visited Tryon Creek for the first time (after yet another stellar recommendation from Cayly), and again found myself instantly captivated by the sheer beauty of the place, the unexpected quietness of the space. We already have Washington Park, Forest Park, countless coastal spots just a short distance away, and then there’s Tryon: A veritable bonanza of green resting comfortably in the middle of our otherwise bustling city. It’s almost unfair how beautiful Portland is.

It was pouring when I parked at the nature center, just as it’d been pouring most of the night and all morning, and as these trails were new to me, and because I was so smitten with the sound of the rain hitting the canopy overhead, I decided I wasn’t going to start with headphones in my ears. A mile in and I had already forgotten they existed, and there I was, thoughtlessly and merrily running the way so many do, the way my sister always has, listening to nothing but the woods telling me stories amidst my own breathing and the rhythmic turnover of my feet on the forest floor.

There’s something about rainy woods that will always be so comforting to me, as if the raindrops themselves are keeping me company, spurring me forward with their steady rhythmic drip drip dripping, my pace quick quick quickening as the trail bends and I stretch my legs as long as I can, eagerly anticipating what I can’t yet see as much as I what I still can: Lush green tumbling in, surrounding me on all sides, ferns reaching out to brush my legs with their waterlogged tendrils, branches falling over themselves to touch my head, my shoulders, narrowly missing my face as I dodge in and around and through them.

I ran four miles of rolling trails with a giddy grin on my face and by the end of it my legs were tired and all of me was soaking wet, and that giddy grin? Well it really hasn’t left my face.

(For the visual learners (myself included; holler), I’ve created a Flickr set to house all of my woods-traipsing photos, doing business as Hike The Planet! More coming soon and very soon.)