1. The blackberries burden their bushes, drooping so heavy and close to the ground that you would swear the skinny spiked branches were about to snap under the weight. The bulbs start out sour and hard as finger bones, and you can’t help but think that they’ll never ripen. But before you know it, they’re so soft they fall apart at your touch, so black they look like lumps of coal on the vine. You load your shirt with too many and close your mind to the oncoming stains. You focus on the sweetness.
2. The Willamette River, which isn’t clean so much as it is generally safe, lapping at the dirty sand of the shore. The beach is crammed with people seeking some escape from the summer heat. They’re too late to visit the public pool, or prefer the unchlorinated water, or wish to indulge in some illicit activity the pool bans. A lot of them are smoking weed. The pier sways like a cradle under your feet, so shut your eyes against the glinting flecks of light. Let the watery safety steal you away from your too-tense body.
3. You both huddle under the black umbrella, crumpled and splintered from years of use. The rain pours down from the skies, catching you unawares in the steaming cemetery. It turns the hills monochrome, veils them with layers of muslin rain. Your brain, that wild machinator, purveyor of schemes and urges which the innocent heart takes responsibility for, hisses for you to kiss them.
4. It is not truly one cemetery, but several: River View and Greenwood Hills and Grand Army of the Republic and I. O. O. F. and Ong Spiritual Burial. They grew together like butting mushrooms until all that separated them were “Private Property– No dogs allowed” signs and lines of dead grass in the summers. Every night you trudge past the college student houses and the broken-down church, pushing through the clouds of sweet-smelling smoke until you reach the grassy ditch that separates it from the intersection. In the summer, the weeds reach your waist and need to be beaten down as you plow through them. The graveyard is covered in trees and chunks of memorial stone, eaten away by wind and moss until they become indistinguishable. It looks so much like a park that it’s easy to forget the bones underneath the surface, slowly crumbling alongside their gravestones.
5. You’d swear the streetlights outside your house glow like no other light. Profiled against one shining yellowed sphere, lit by another, your face is eerie. Obscured in all the right places. Almost alluring.
6. Nighttime, during the spring or summer or early fall, when the winds have slowed and the bitter cold has softened, when the windows beg you to pry them wide and welcome the warm rainy air with open arms. Heed them. Dig your fingers into the white plastic and pull, feel the tendrils of heat seep into your lungs. Let the AC escape into the open atmosphere. Close your eyes and allow the drip-drop of the storm to echo in your dark room.
7. The pigeons downtown gather in big flocks, mechanical beaks and feathers ranging from tar to printer paper and back again. They skitter around the dusty cars and dusty people, chasing the latest crumbs of bread: the feral businessmen of the animal world. Don’t kick them, your friends holler, but even if you tried, they’d dodge you and make hasty circles into the sky.
8. The fact that there’s a high school next to your house called “Riverdale.” Just like the shitty TV show! Every time someone asks where you live, you say “Right next to the Riverdale High School,” and imagine yourself as Jughead. You laugh.
9. The first spring concerns itself only with growth. Fruits swell on their vines, and you pluck them on the way back from the cemetery, glancing both ways down the intersection to ensure no one catches your modest theft. The trees balloon with leaves, donning their emerald finery, spreading their arms to block the jealous sky. But this renaissance of green brings with it beautiful rot. The last ruined blackberries drop from their vines, black mush battered to the ground by the first new showers. Between the gravestones, mushrooms expand from the fresh grasses, sprouting into the air like miniature mountains of flesh, only to melt away again into black drippings that will vanish during the night rain. Don’t step on them. The trees, so scorched by the summer sun, bloom for a brief instant in their new stormy satiation. Then they fall apart, brought to their knees by the bitter wind, letting their crumbling costumes drift to the ground.
10. Eating lunch down by the art museum, which feels like your own private TV show that you and your friends catch every day at noon. There are some recurring characters; the pretty man with thick braids that he layers on top of his head, the teenage goth who compliments your makeup when he passes by, the pavement cleaner who walks with a limp and talks to you like the electrified audience he knows you are.
11. You fell in love with Powell’s the first time you visited in 2018. For a while, your screensaver was of yourself, curled up in the kids’ section with a copy of Calvin and Hobbes, long blond hair streaming down your back, back when you had long blond hair. Was that you? It must have been.
12. The fact that your medical transition is covered entirely, with no cost to you. Thank God for state healthcare.
13. The Safeway by your school, even though not everyone wears their masks and the security cameras remind you of the global panopticon. Your friend Zadie always lets you use her coupons, although she showers you in empty threats of what will happen if you don’t repay her. There’s a woman behind the hot food counter that calls you and your friends honey and compliments your style after you buy two corn dogs. And outside of the automatic doors, a man sells Street Roots newspapers, which you don’t buy, but your friend Teo does. He smiles and passes over the money. Thank you! No problem! A microcosm of human kindness.
14. The stone floor of your room may be cold, almost unbearably so during school mornings, ridged and jarring and utterly impossible to clean. But sometimes, when you feel heavy, destructive, too strong for your own good, it seems like the only thing able to hold your weight.
15. During a few months in the winter, the moon sets outside your window. Its soft white light pierces the warmth of your room. The pallor radiates through the clouds, a mirror of the sleeping sun. The moon creeps across your face, curls up in your eyes, whispers to you that the hour grows late.
16. The bright black-and-yellow bottles of göt2bglued which line your shelves, these symbols of safe, contained teenage rebellion. You know that other stores sell them–probably most stores–but, to you, they will forever only fit in the “haircare” section of Safeway, shining like a pair of sunflowers among the garden of bright, blooming hair sprays and gels and waxes.
17. Rocky Horror at the Clinton Street Theater, loud and disgusting, crass and overwhelming and sexual and unabashedly queer; as you step out from the clamor at 2:01 in the morning on your 16th birthday, you’re already planning to apply for a job there in two years.
18. The fog, which is yellow or blue or white depending on the light. You can’t feel the moisture, just the coldness that settles in your lungs. It is a grandmotherly shawl for the ancient mossy trees. It hides the clawing black branches and ghostly gravestones, making the ground seem unsure, like it could float away into the sky if you take your eyes off it.
19. Hearing your friends talk about the future is surreal. They speak of Portland like a tiny, rural hometown. God, I can’t wait to escape and go to college! Live in an actual city, like New York or Toronto. It’s surreal; you moved here from a tiny town in Arkansas. It’s so boring here. I’ve lived here my entire life! This is by far the largest city you’ve ever lived in, but to them it seems like a cramped cage.
You didn’t realize how congested you had been in Arkansas, in Ohio, in Michigan. Here, you explore yourself. And there are times when the exploration stings, discoveries and interactions which will forever tint your self-perception with faint shame. But there is also beauty, hidden in you like a prickling splinter. And, slowly, you learn to appreciate it.
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