However, living this way is doing something for me. I enjoy meeting new people, stepping into their lives for a time and experiencing space the way they do. I will be moving again Sunday to Fremont where I will house sit for a couple of weeks.

Joan said the house was yellow, and she wasn't kidding: bright sunshiny yellow. It's a small house, a cottage perched up from the road and set back into shrubs and trees. The front door is dark blue with a series of paper shapes dangling on thin string hanging from the knocker. It was standing wide open and I stopped to knock before entering, but when I did enter it was into a dark red room. Dark red. It was beautiful. We introduced ourselves and then I just started in on the color. Turns out she's got a young artist staying there in exchange for painting her interior however he chooses. How lovely to be a middle-aged woman in a small cottage with a backyard garden and a young artist sleeping and creating in her space. How nice. I would like that. I think I want that.

I was excited. Touring each room, observing all the items she's collected throughout the world and displayed in seemingly careless ways, it just got better and better. I get to live there alone for two weeks. Alone in that house. I will open the shades and the windows allowing the soft light to illuminate all that color, allowing the soft breeze to push to and fro the long sheet of rice paper hanging in the doorway between the living room and kitchen. There are books to look at, a garden in which to sit in the sun and hold one. I will listen to the radio.

Her energy put me in touch with mine, with that tiny spark of desire to live freely and accepting no compromise. She told me about her business, her travels. There are pictures providing evidence of her vast social network. She lives. How can I do that too? What would it take? Courage… and action. Oh, it hurts to think of that. But for awhile this summer I can do it. I can pile everything I need into that dying car and leave a place and friends for a new place and new acquaintences. And what it accomplishes is nurturing one whole half of myself that I have locked up for years, have not legitimized for the sake of love or for acceptance within the circle of people I know.

I have spent a good deal of time, beginning in Korea but materializing this summer, revisiting my history. It was necessary to really travel back in time to learn why, now, I had become nostalgic. I have learned it was about feeling caged. I have been trapped in my life and it parallels the same feelings I had when I was growing up. I felt myself beginning old cycles of coping, of plotting escape. It has been very appealing because escape is thrilling and secret, even illicit. But the answer wasn't in the past - even if there are parts of it I must visit to experience for the very first time - the answer is in the experiences of the present. It's all this moving and building of experiences and collecting a long list of phone numbers that open opportunity and possibility and that bring me back again to the now - the end of stagnation. I'm happy to be moving forward again, even if it is oblique to the track that has become a rut.

(Maybe all this wandering is just an elaborate avoidance of the pain in my heart.)

I never have to sit alone in a building somewhere surrounded by my things, my love's things, and shut the door on a cage I have built for myself. I do not know that right now. But I think about it and I am good at imagining pain and so I feel the bottom of my heart dropping when I think about what it would be like and the self-loathing and, surely, the wails of interminable agony.

Later there were more people to meet. The Baltic Room on Pine. I wasn't excited to drive down there alone, find parking, and then hope to find them. I did it because one of them might have room for me in her apartment after I leave that fantastic little house. I did find a place to park after about 30 minutes. I did pay $3 to get in, shoving my way past clusters of well-dressed people holding drinks and smoking. I did find them sitting very near the band on a couch. Julie saw me first, nudging her brother who was talking to someone else. He looked at me but didn't see me for a few seconds before my face clicked somewhere in his impaired mind. Then he leapt from the couch, swallowing me in his arms.

Oh Jason. You are so drunk.

After five minutes the room arrangements were secured: Yes, I can stay. (Whew.) Then they left one by one until only three of us remained. I've not seen him so animated; I have not seen him this intoxicated in maybe 8 or 9 years. I offered Jason a ride home and a trip to Taco Bell. I've known him forever see, I know he loves that hideous food. I know how to feed him; I have memorized the superficial things, but I don't really know him.

Can you walk?
Of course!
Can you walk normally?

I tried to keep up with this staggering, noisy man. He talked incessantly and I couldn't keep up with that either.

Did you see the size of that… that human?
Huh?
The diameter of the legs alone was.. disturbing.

I introduced him to the Falcon, still crowded with my cowering and dismantled bike from the move earlier this week. I have not been riding. The engine starts, the dash lights go on.

Whoa! Digital.... You have opposing cylinders, did you know that?

Apparently he can visualize the engine from the sound it makes. I remember him in white coveralls leaning under the hood of the Saab before he painted it red. Later he says:

Hear that sound?
Yeah.
It's your car.
Feh. I know that.
It's two valves making that sound, not three, not four. See, 'cause when it's two then they can be in sync, but three and it won't. And four, well, that's so rare it's not worth thinking about.

I'm just looking at him. Just looking.

You know too much about this kind of stuff.

He's sleeping sitting up clutching a bulging Taco Bell bag and his large Coke.

When you revisit the past it's possible to learn again why you left it behind in the first place. And too, it's possible to see other people habitually trying to recreate the past right now and for the future, stuck always in time and moving through the present as apparitions of their younger selves.