Day 13- June 1, 2006 - leaving Portland

I wake up half a dozen times throughout the night, checking and rechecking the clock to be sure I'm up to turn the alarm off before it has the chance to sound. We fell asleep together in what was designated as my bed, but halfway through the night, I felt him get up and move into his own. I had dreams that upset me when I woke up, but I can't remember the details now.

It's raining when we wake up, and after I nag him enough, Doug gets up. We're ready to leave by 10, which of course does us no good since we opt to lay around watching the Price is Right for the hour before checkout. We left- Doug smoked while I checked out and he meant to be out of my sight, but I could see him through the lobby's long windows.

We walked through the rain, I with an umbrella, he without, stopping to get breakfast/lunch at a deli and bypassing the coffee place we wanted to stop at - which advertised a white chocolate caramel coffee- because we were such there was another on the way. There wasn't, and after filling out postcards at the train station- another called Union- we ventured out to find a Starbucks a few blocks away.

We checked our suitcase all the way to San Francisco. Not trusting Amtrak's baggage checking ability, Doug asks the man behind the counter- a small framed old man with glasses and a soft voice- several times whether or not the bag will make it on the bus with us when we switch at Emeryville, or if other measures need to be taken. He, sounding like she, assures us that it will but we have our worries all the same.

The train was late arriving ad hsa been consistently late since. We're chasing a freight train through the mountains and the view was beautiful earlier, but it has since gotten dark so that the windows show only the reflections of the inside of the train.

I'm almost through a book of short stories- How to Breathe Underwater- that Doug brought. It is good, and I can tell it is good because it's making me want to write, making me remember stories about my seven year old self losing a tooth in school, really losing a tooth and insisting that someone stole it, posing that maybe the tooth fairy tracked me down in class, mistook my desk for a pillow. My teacher played along with it, because really, what else could she do.

I got to thinking about my life, in the most general sense, lining up facts and moments hoping to come up with something conclusive. It's hodge-podged at best, a mess at worst, cluttered with inconsistent themes and varying degrees of hypocrisy. And sometimes I feel like I am trying to mold fiction from fact or fact from fiction, trying to pull a plot off of these moments, these story points so I can hold it up in the light- it is thin and goosebumped like chicken skin- and see what shape it resembles. I want to play Pictionary with my memories, performing some sort of high stakes Rorschact test that will tell me exactly where my life is going bacsed on the negative space of where it's been.

Maybe that's what the thought of writing this trip was so appealing. It has a definite start, a definite end. It is self contained and I ought to be able to carve a character arc out of this time. It seems silly now, but at the start of the trip, I had hoped that my daily journal entries would amass to something- some sort of valued truth. That I could hold my thoughts up to Doug's and create prisms, like holding a gem up to the light and casting flecks along the walls, shattered byt there. I want to be disassembled and put together in a way that feels more right. I expect too much and maybe I'm not hoping for that anymore, but smaller things, like that our luggage arrives at the places we're going to.

There was a while earlier where I was uust watching Doug- he was sleeping or near sleep with his headphones on and I just felt lucky, plain and simple lucky, that he somehow fits me so well and I stared at him, studying, hoping that my eyes looked as warm as they felt- warm enough to start tearing- and that somehow this would express love because I was feeling it so strong that it was hard to imagine that it wouldn't come across clear across my face. Because he always asks "how much do you love me?" and this is the answer.