I suppose it is natural to reflect on previous experiences when starting new ones. I found this journal entry from 2007 about my time in Bellingham. It seems a lifetime ago!
23 Feb 2007
Heading: Jordan Rain.
Current mood:sleepy
The band broke up, the bulldozers moved in and condos were scheduled to be built where the flop used to be. But I remember staring up at a bedroom ceiling. He'd painted it blue, with sponged on clouds and starry, glow-in-the-dark constellations—just like the real night sky, so that he could point them out to me in the small hours . . . Draconis and Orian, Big Bear and Little Bear . . . before I moved out into a place of my own he painted a star on the ceiling and gave it my name. "See now, I'll always know where to look for you."
There were five people, plus Tim-the-poet-in-residence, officially renting the flop/flat. In actuality, there were always more--even on the nights when the band wasn't shilling an impromtu, in-house gig, rousting for the rent. Some months the coffee can was more full than others but there was always soup on the stove, toast and tea.
There was an old pipe running the span of the doorway between the kitchen and living room which I habitually used to swing across the threshold for luck. Tim laughed at me and said, "You really don't care what anyone thinks of you, do you?" Jordan threw his drumsticks in the air trying to catch and toss them like hacky-sacks from his feet to his elbows, to his knees and back to his hands again, intoning in a strange sing-song voice,"Should she? Should she be like you? Should she be like me?" He missed his footing and fell.
Years later Jordan and I stood in the street together, waiting for the bus headed toward a new university, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his tousled hair hanging in his eyes. Jordan had been the first person I had met when I first arrived in town; we had been on the same bus together. In his case, he had been "travelling" in order to avoid some socio-political situation and was now returning after what was presumably an acceptable cooling-off period. As we walked up the hill he observed that the street clock had stopped. We had walked for hours through trees and past sculpture gardens in the soft grey northwestern stillness. He might have been a serial killer, but I trusted him and we ate wild blackberries and sang songs about spiders and waterspouts, churches and steeples, Jacks and Jills.
During the subsequent days, turned to months, turned to two years, I had variously been considered important and unimportant, sweet, cruel, witty, dull . . . I had played may parts in the ongoing community drama. I had seen so many others appear, deliver their lines and exit but had thought all along that I was different than all of those . . . guest appearances. I thought I belonged. I'd been wrong. I was not one of the constants. I was just another variable in the equation of Bellingham.
Jordan gave me my first place to stay and then later on, as I repeatedly found and lost my own way, we weren't always together. Yet now he was here again, as if we had never been apart. He stood waiting with me for the bus that would take me away. "When you go," he said, "--everyone else here will forget you, because that's what they do . . . but I won't. I remember everyone--I'll remember you." He turned and walked away; I was left to wait on my own. As the bus pulled out of town, I noticed that someone had finally fixed the clock.
