Look Up

"We will always be a light"

After the (amazing, wonderful, fantastic) Stars concert ended Thursday night, Lauren and I crossed back over the Ross Island Bridge and took the long way home. "We're going to go past my old house," she told me, although I was driving. "Then let's go by mine, too," I agreed. They were both on the way home.

Patton Court was steeper than I recalled. All I could really remember about the house I lived in with my mom till I was about eight were small, specific things, like how once an Easter egg was hidden in the numbers nailed beside the door, and wearing tap dancing shoes on the deck, and being afraid of coyotes in the forest behind the house. "We used to be so rich," Lauren mused; her old house was huge, one of the highest points in the West Hills. We drove the loop around her neighborhood and she told me about alcoholic neighbors, holiday parties, picking blackberries. It's funny, the things we remembered.

Today I found myself in Northeast Portland on 21st Avenue in front of the house I lived in with my dad until I was about five. Very little came back to me: tacky pink and green hippopotamus wallpaper my dad tore down from my bedroom walls to paint them white, the childless, ultra-liberal next door neighbors I'd visit and receive Golden Books from, the old man in the green house next door. I wonder now if the couple welcomed me or thought I was annoying; I wonder if the old man was lonely. Once I was walking our dog Shortstop with my Dad when Shortstop was attacked by a pit bull; I had to run home to tell my stepmother to call the vet, and I almost got lost in spite of our house being less than three blocks away. Another time I threw rocks to break the glass windows in our own shed, because an eight-year-old neighbor boy encouraged me. Later, however, my conscience got the better of me, and I confessed to my mother and later to my father. The rickety swingset in my backyard, marvelously unsafe. The steep carpeted stairway. A Superman-themed birthday party and cheating in "Pin the 'S' on Superman".

Twelve years ago, I believed what people told me about right and wrong, and the tooth fairy, and Heaven. I didn't know you. These things come back to me in vague waves of memory but that's not who I am and although they happened to me, it doesn't feel like my life. Maybe it's just been too long for me to recall how I really felt; maybe I'm omitting some profound part of me and it's unfair to say none of it meant much aside from just being my past. But you know?

"There is only one thing. There's nothing after that but you and I. Nothing after that but you and me."

I realized today that if there's no God or Heaven and Hell, and if all we and our world is, is a result of science and evolution, if my perception of reality is total bullshit and I am nothing but a thought floating in space, it doesn't even matter. Because I know what I believe is real and what matters, and that's love, and I'm going to live according to that.

"For once, let's just allow ourselves to be whatever it is we are."
[Garden State]

posted by Allison Francis @ 12:11 AM