Dear Portland,
It was always you.
It was.
I read this book set in Oregon in my mid-twenties and felt for just the second time in my life a pull to a place I hadn’t been. This time as an adult and with a stronger sense of who I was and what it felt like to choose your own home, to create it from nothing, a place that was an extension of yourself in a building, in a neighborhood, in a city. Something that didn’t exist anywhere else.
In much the same way and around the same time I met a boy who stood behind the bar and made my muddled blackberry cocktails and smiled a thousand watt smile at me and bounced on his feet as he laughed in his deep, delicious voice.
And then I knew what it was like to be called to a person. To find a person who could be home, too.
And it was always you.
Your name was tattooed on me in some secret place, as real as the line drawn around your forearm.
Ten years ago we moved to Portland together into a little sort-of-one-bedroom/sort-of-studio apartment on the top floor with no air conditioning and I had a first home in the city of my dreams with the person who felt like home. We took cool baths on hot summer nights. We hung upside-down on the monkey bars. We sipped wine with our elbows on heavy wooden bars where ivy strands blew in the open doors from above.
We never meant to leave each other. There was a reason to leave Portland and then another and then you went one way and I went another and we tried to get back. To the city. To you. And we tried. And we didn’t. Or, we haven’t.
I haven’t stopped feeling that pull for a single day.
And now I get to go home. In a few weeks I’ll call Portland home again. With my daughter by my side, I’ll find a new four walls where I’ll begin again. New art on the walls. New covers on the beds. I’ll walk the same streets and different ones. Sit at the same bar or another. I’m the same and I’m not. Portland is the same and it isn’t.
I wonder how much you’re the same or not, too.
It doesn’t really matter.
It’s still always you.