(no subject)
In the past two weeks, Bryan and I went from Iowa City to Kansas City to Denver to Las Vegas to Los Angeles to Salt Lake City to Phoenix to Sedona to Los Angeles to Salt Lake City to Oakland to Salt Lake City to Minneapolis and finally, barely, to home. We went by bus, plane, trolley, and subway.
Most of the cities were experienced superficially, at all hours, through the Greyhound tunnel or the Delta terminal. With some, we dug deeper, pulling out our credit cards in exchange for new experiences. In the cities with friends, we went even further. And the daily turnover of languages and food and city aesthetics and social norms, seamed together by our one-way tickets, was enough of a jolt to feel really uncomfortable, to feel challenged enough to forget my life at home.
There were moments when the stars aligned, too, like when eight of us - who more or less had all met each other that day - were laughing so hard at Coach Sushi in Oakland that it was difficult to imagine any of us in any other place at any other time.
It only took ten days to forget what happened to Dad. It seems cruel of whatever part of my brain that processes these things that the most colorful, most flavorful elements of learning how to wrestle a trip like this were the very moments that tricked me into thinking that I had Dad again. Whenever I sat on the plane - there were about eight flights - I looked out the window and heard him talking in complete sentences, telling me about glaciers, saw him walking and jumping.
In the Utah desert our bus was weaving through empty canyons and most everyone was sleeping, or at least closing their eyes as a way of coping with monotony and stiff joints, and I was working my way through podcasts. Dutifully, I listened to Dan Savage struggle his way through a piece about losing his mother, and I listened to a couple from Texas talk about losing their pet bull, Chance, and then seven years later losing the clone of their beloved bull, Second Chance, and eventually in the absolute darkness of that evening in Utah I felt like the only people in the world were me, Dan Savage, and that couple from Texas. I felt like when the woman from Texas said, "We didn't know that when we brought Chance back to life that we would only have to lose him twice," she was talking to me and Dan Savage and were we were all nodding in the desert together.
I've been home for two days and this is what I am thinking about: how green Iowa is and how good Iowa smells, and what is left of Dad, what is left of Mom. It is hard to process much more than that. I'd like to someday return to my notes and write at length about those new cities and new people, but for now I am just at the brink of realizing that I did this and that at certain points of this trip I healed, even if that healing feels fleeting now, by leaving behind the core of what I knew and what I am.