In This Body: Dear Portland (as if to a Lover)
“Home in a way geography does not understand”
"In This Body" is comprised of true stories about sex, gender, the body, and love, written by Fiona George, for NAILED.
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I love you more than I could anyone contained in a body. You as my home, more of a commitment than I could know through flesh. It doesn’t matter if I leave you. We both know I may settle down or die in a different city. Maybe not even in a city. Would that be better? If you were my one and only where city.
You won’t be.
But you are my one and only home. Home in a way geography does not understand.
Do you remember my little girl bare feet? How your sidewalks and wood chipped parks toughened and blackened them each summer. The skin on my soles still thick. I still hike barefoot.
Your mud. Earth flesh between my toes. My feet submerged in one of your spring puddles. As good as sex in a different way. When I was still small, when I could take off my clothes and roll around in your mud. Gritty, squishy soft, and cool earth brown earth from under toe nails to tangled into hair. All sensation, like sex. Messy, like sex.
And then wash off with the garden hose. Your water.
When I jump into the Willamette, when I’m older. Or buck ass naked on Sauvies Island, your nude beach. Where a grown up can get naked and roll around in the sand of their home, wash off in the river. Find a purse on the beach that I keep. For ages.
A small purse that I use when I go dancing. Because you have the nights that I love to dance at. Goth nights. Yes, lots of cities have these. Most cities do. But they are not you. They could not take a Goth night and put it into a context that I know as well as my home. How I always run into people there. These people that feel like me, because they are a part of you.
A place marked as mine.
That one time, one of many where I’ve left my biological mark on you. When I walked down downtown Burnside in bright daylight drunk on Pabst. How I hadn’t been drunk many times before so I didn’t know I was drunk. But I was so drunk that when I had to piss, I squatted against the wall right where I was. Pulled down my skinny jeans in front of all four lanes of rush hour traffic, their windows reflecting the sun.
I’ve peed all over you. Puked into your streets. Bled into the Willamette. Left sticky come stains wherever I can. The rare winter snow angels I’ve made that melt into your soil, flow into your river. You are mine like you’re every Portlander’s city. You are mine, because I am yours. I have left parts of me in you.
All my teeth are here, somewhere.
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You know I have more pictures with you than I’ve taken with any lover? In your river, your parks, between your buildings, your public schools and public pools, your indie theaters and readings in your bars. No one else has been with me through all of that.
And I’ve photographed you and I’ve never done that to a lover. You make me brave like I couldn’t be with a person. When you look beautiful, the kind of beautiful that makes me want to pull out the unworthy camera on my phone and get a picture of you in that moment, I do it. To save you in my heart and mind forever. We have the kind of thing you know is forever.
When forever is such a hard thing to know.
You’ve brought me into every place, to every person that has changed my life. In one of your restaurants, my parents met. And that’s just the beginning of you and me, you being the place that brought my parents together so that me specifically could be born. My sister specifically could be born. In another city, they would meet other people. Work at different restaurants.
And the children they’d have wouldn’t be us.
You’ve led me to some toxic people. People who did change my life. I’ve learned things. How I’ve learned about depression, manipulation, consent. Myself what I could see in others. Words and how to use them. Emotions and how to express them. And I’ve learned the people I want to surround myself with. You are full of them.
I’ve drawn a mental map of my personal experiences over you. The landmarks of where I’ve peed, or puked. That bus stop I left my tampon at on the way to a booty call, the one on Powell near my moms house. The houses and apartments of former lovers, former friends, former weed dealers, former selves. What stores used to be what stores before businesses failed. What corners used to be houses that are now condos. How they used to have comfy couches in the Stumptown coffee shop on Division, but they’ve followed the trend of hard minimal furniture now.
I see you change. You see me, too. You see that I am not the little girl anymore, the one who touched your sky on swing sets. How I have new ways to get high these days.
And you are no small city anymore. I mean, look at how much you’ve changed down Division. And I didn’t even know North Portland growing up, but now who doesn’t know the names Alberta and Missisippi? Two of your big limbs.
We don’t always have to like how the other one changes. We will always miss the smallness we had together.
You’ve gotten so big. Nationally known, now. Trendy.
Do you think I’ll go big? Do you think that someday everyone will know my name? When I finally finish my book?
And if I don’t, if this is where I stop. If I never make my life all I ever wanted, became who I wanted. I will still have a home when I fall.
A city to cradle me.
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Read the previous installment of In This Body, "Laws of Consent" here.
Header photograph courtesy of Matty Byloos.