Before I moved to Portland it had existed solely as a temporally frozen stereotype, an artifice of of the hyperreal in my mind that I held to be simultaneously truthful and not at all truthful.
This was held in contrast to the nature of Los Angeles, what I considered a more immediately complex subject with its layers of weathering upon weathering it deposits on the souls of its people.
I had claimed to know Los Angeles, as much as one can know entire neighborhoods and intuitive distinctions found in almost twenty million people. I understood what was real and and was was not about it. For example, La La Land is not real, despite what a woman who I walked arm and arm with up and down the Santa Monica pier might have said. Award shows are not granters of epistemic status; the industry is a milquetoast shallow in the ocean of social reality.
The artifice, at that time, was that the city where the two rivers meet was the place that young people go to retire. And I despised retirement, despised its existence, despised that it was necessary to think about for the short portion of history in which it was possible. Thanks to the wonders of queer reinvention and Ronald Reagan I felt and continue to feel in my forties when I have more than a decade to go before that happens. I cannot begin to fathom what age forty year old me will feel. Will I have the midlife crisis my friend says I will, and go do really teenage-y things? This is of course part of why thinking about retirement unnerved me. Retiring in Portland was especially unnerving, even if it was as a young person; that’s what my parents will do and I am certainly not them. A country house in the patchwork fields of Biei, Hokkaido, with a garden and a whisky collection, was always more appealing to me, although I recognize now that Bend, Oregon might be as close as I get to that.
The artifice did not hold me for long, truthfully. I fell in love with the City of Roses as I was falling out of love with a woman who held a future of Subarus, a bicycle, and a bungalow in Portland as both plausible and not, much like I held my artifice. And this slowly shattered my perceptions of that relationship.
A slow wildfire burned a future with her out of my mind. Her proposition about a Portland future, which came into being when we visited, was perhaps the spark. Her assertion that if we were to marry we would divorce and remarry again was dry scrub in a windy valley, and the Santa Monica pier date was the gasoline that turned the conflagration into a natural disaster of the soul. We broke up then had sex in my parents’ house a scant month after.
And then a scant year and a half later I packed up and left for Portland. I am surprised it took me that long.
In that year and a half I moved from acceptance to regret to anger to grief to simply feeling the absence of her presence. And I poured our bodies into her and her into me for a brief period, but much more often we poured them into other people. And I tried to fall in love again. And I let her have a grip for too lang past the point that we had last spoken to each other.
I did fall in love, at least three times, and acted like it twice.
The first was with the woman who I walked the Santa Monica pier with. We now speak once every two years, maybe. I had found that sometimes if you pour your body into someone too much there comes a point where only your body can pour out. Your heart and soul are left behind to shrivel in the heat, unable to thermoregulate.
The second was more complicated. It was more complicated to the point that it took two years after we spoke for what I had intended to be the final time that I realized that what had happened was what had happened. That we had been closer to partners than not.
It was close to the same mistake as before. Except we mutually poured what we had thought the other wanted out and resented the other for it.
This relationship continued past when I moved to Portland, a strand of unbroken feeling tying me partially to Los Angeles. At one point they had promised they’d move to Portland; to be the one to toss aside my desire for companionship; to U-Haul. I realized what that meant long after the offer.
The third, unlike the others, I wrote poetry about after the fact. I dedicated dandelions to. But if I were to go there now / to a substation filled with dandelions / and be asked again what I gave up on / I would write down your initials. They tweeted about me.
To the first two: this is not your missing poem. To the third: thank you in advance for being in my bridal party.
In Portland, I continued to fall in love with the city. I continued to fall in love. A charity case and a stuck car and a pocket butch and a displaced San Diegan and someone in LA and someone not and…
Portland is blue and green. Cross-processed Fujifilm Provia. The St Johns Bridge is green, the camera store blue, the trees green, the river blue. Blue, green. Green, blue.
The love was blue and green. Deoxygenated heart-blood and freshness. A charity case and a stuck car and a pocket butch and a displaced San Diegan and someone in LA and someone not all both green and blue. All both as integral to the City of Roses as the roses themselves.
There were some, for a period of time, I missed more than others. There was only one I wrote poetry about. There is only one who is now something different.
This is also not the others’ missing poem.
Suddenly, everything paused, in an unbelievably pregnant way. Any semblance of a realization of the old dream teetered.
We existed as a temporally frozen stereotype. We existed briefly outside of the hyperreal.
Suddenly, there was the last.
Estradiol, blue, the plants in the window, green, masks, blue, masks, green. Blue, green. Green, blue.
From Maggie Nelson, Bluets: Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself a disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?
From my own heartbreak I can say that being in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back is no madness; it is to be a lesbian.
It is in Portland I met the last woman I desire to fall in love with. It is in Portland where I fell so deeply, completely, wholeheartedly, perfectly in love. Where I regained the desire to marry, til death.
But fittingly it was in Los Angeles where our relationship was formed and it was in Los Angeles where we put the first of two rings on each others’ fingers. But fittingly it is in Portland where we will celebrate our commitment and become wives.
We both have fallen deeply, completely, wholeheartedly, perfectly in love with Portland. We love its summer days and fall colors and endless rains and the fact that it can be and has been so difficult to love romantically and platonically and the fact that when it does occur it is all the better and stronger for it. We love the rivers and the skies and the St Johns Bridge. We love each other.
To Portland, this poem is yours; and to the last, this poem is yours as well; for my heart and soul are forever yours, my love.