I'm already happier.

The house just as I remembered the smells, the sounds, the red. Unpacking was fast and tidy and I'm already settled. In a bed. I slept, just the way I think it ought to be, between soft cotton sheets (flannel now) under thick fog. I like to lie there just nigh of slumber sensing all the points on which it pushes ever slightly against bare contours of me. Bliss. Now I can finally sleep.

I took the bus downtown from there to meet friends. Rain was fine, but not the slick it made of indoors: I slipped and fell on new linoleum. I know how to make an entrance. Didn't help my ailing back any, and my palm - the one just healed from the crash - took a bruise.

I don't like Pioneer Square. Never have, never will. I must remember not to go there.

But I did get to drive the truck home again, when the owner, who promised to drive me, was not interested in keeping his word. Buzzing, he said, but I know that's not the truth. The alternative was better anyway: bouncing home. Of course I took the long way.

Exchanged it in the morning for ferry passage to hometown. An old boat, I think. No, I know it was old, but I don't know its name. They've renovated it and, I must say, they did a poor job. Still, I was excited to ride on a piece of history. Weird how they built them then, very tall and narrow, looking as though easily toppled by a large swell. Motoring toward us all waiting there on the dock, I really imagined what it would look like rolling over and back up like a buoy trapped on an angry sea.

She was angry this morning. I tried to write, that activity so important. Ferry rides recently symbolic of shifts in persona and the process of transition squeezing out all the juice, which I record hastily in ink. But today, only this:

I can't read my handwriting because the vessel, tall with narrow base, is no match for the height of swollen turmoil, and we're all rocking back and forth, pushing up then slapping down into the valleys between white-capped swells. The water is almost black in fury. Coal. It's deepening. Spray so white in contrast. Some of it flies higher even than the windows on the second deck; it soars in a wide arch above the ship as wings propelling us instead of the engine whose roar drums up from the back. -- No there's definitely blue and green, deep rich hues but still so close to black. -- In the distance I see blue sky. The storm must be focused only on this ship.