Thirty seconds, some twenty-five years ago and it only lasted that long because I slowed down to a shuffle, careful not to trip on a sidewalk made treacherous by tree roots angling for freedom. Thirty seconds out of my fifty-five years of seconds, all 1 billion and roughly 800 million of them.
Connecting the dots between my running routes and those childless years of unencumbered time I’m guessing the run itself took me about an hour, one of roughly 500 thousand hours of my years.
An hour I’ve never forgotten, primarily because of you.
I ran then, as I do now, often before dawn when neighborhoods are silent, an occasional light over a kitchen sink blinking on as I pass by, my footsteps unnaturally loud, as though I am heavy, more square than rectangle. My street ran from Mt. Tabor to the Willamette, and I’d follow it so that sunrise would cast a shadow I’d try to catch.
On this particular morning—warm and dry, so I know it was during the three magical months of summer in Portland—I was aiming for the full moon, setting ahead of me over the forested hills of West Portland, pulled by forces I didn’t understand. A moon the color of copper polished to new. I turned south as I approached the bridge and there they both were—the sun already hinting at heat to my left and that glorious moon to my right. I stopped, cupping them in my outstretched hands. Restlessness calmed by their presence.
Back to you.
Holding two handfuls of beauty made it hard to run and I laid them down as I turned back east. There you were, bending down to pick up the newspaper someone had thrown onto your porch, and then you stood, like a heron waiting for a catch at daybreak. Your body was bare, shroud-like against the purple door. A sparse triangle below, your hair down to your waist, full, the dark gray of a stormy ocean.
The pause before you turned, my moment with you.
Now, on what might be the hottest day on record in Portland, I wonder if you are still in the lilac-colored home, stripping down, looking for cool. You were older then, and so older now and the immediacy of writing this letter seems poignant, the impossibility of you ever seeing this makes it even more compelling.
Record heat in that city I love, a landscape punctuated by river and bridge, giving homage to the way our lives and stories unfold. More common were winds that caused stately spruce and majestic fir to bend, as though to pray, rains that overstayed welcome for weeks at a time. I remember a flood, the year the Willamette almost breached to spill onto downtown streets. I walked to the bus that day, a plastic bag over the books in my backpack and another over me, three torn holes for my arms and head. All of us on that number 15 bus, stood as it crossed the Hawthorne Bridge, the river looking angry and brown. Weather, like a drag queen, big and loud and outrageous. We gave the river an ovation.
Pay attention. Talk back. Get loud.
But, I digress, a bit—not really. I wrote a poem in your honor many years ago, on a day when the memory of your nakedness gave me strength to tell my then husband that I’d fallen in love with a woman. I invoked the image of you rising, paper in hand, looking at me, brazen and beautiful, in the years that followed.
Open. Strong. Unabashed.
Gratefully,
Kris