I man without a woman is like schooling without brain

, no — no one really tells you.

Then one day you’ll board a flight to Portland. Let’s make it Halloween weekend, to turn up the narrative tension. And let’s say, you’re hoping to connect with friends, but planning to stay alone.

Weeks earlier, your body will trigger a soft alarm — Alone in Portland for 5 days…Rain, Sad, Isolation, No Good!! — and you’ll pay attention to it, because alarms like this are unusual (you love traveling alone, and your body is giving no such indicators about a similar week-long stretch in Seattle). But your mind can’t see any cause for the red lights, so you pull the trigger. And for the first 12 hours in town, you’re fine.

The first time you’ll go to a bluegrass-folk festival, feet stomping next to makeshift stages in fields and barns and forest clearings, watching musicians improvise together in glorious fugue. The first time you’ll see a fiddler yell-singing in joyful abandon next to her bandmates and think “I want to do that” and “I can do that” and “holy ****…where has this been all my life??”

It’s not until you step out your morning here, to get coffee from a perfectly innocuous cafe window, that your brain starts asking questions. Where was that pizza place y’all used to go for trivia night? Was it near here? Wow…think that’s the one. How was finding it that easy? Wait a minute…wasn’t this also where you ordered drinks in a bar for the first time? And the memories tumble back:

You, a college student in town for the summer for a film & radio fellowship.

Dappled, sun-drenched 2008.

Am attitude is like a flat tyre and you cannot go anywhere until you change it

And when summer ended, and you headed back to school, you kept those seeds here, away from your real life. You didn’t think or speak or make with those skills again, for years. You had tasted vision here; you had dreamed dreams; and it was too much. For what is creation, but an act of hope? And what is grief, but a freezing of all desire?

A therapist may ask you to describe what the box looks like, what it feels like, what happens when you pick it up (no clue, don’t care, and it shakes like a banshee out of hell). But you’re not with a therapist, you’re alone in a city you haven’t been to for 13 years. Weirdly, instean, you find yourself thinking about soil. Specifically, the soil of this place, and metaphorically, how you arrived here 13 years ago with a deep wound, one no one in your life knew how to dress. You’d barely had time to go home for her funeral services before coming here—this place, more than anywhere else, was a landscape for your pain. Is it any wonder your wound seeped into this ground?

Whatever’s in there seems to be filling the space — which makes no sense, because you have written thousands of words about grief. You’ve had hundreds of conversation, sung so many songs. You’ve known grief as a frozen pond, as a knife, grief like a flood plain, grief like a persistent child. You have wrung. this. grief. towel. dry. And yet, today, here it sits. It’s uninvited, and impenetrable, and fully saturated. It’s fucking annoying. (And why is it a box?)

But that wasn’t the only thing that happened here. This city, that summer, was also seeding grounds for your adult creative life — the first pips of what you could do and learn; what you could make with others; who you could be on your own. (“The first time you’ll see something and think ‘I want to do that’ and “I can do that” and ‘where has this been all my life??’”)

You’re a little afraid to poke it, this dread time capsule, so you just glower at it. And order a tequila soda, and shrink into the back of the Book Pub, and cry a hot frustrated tear of howisthisthingnotPOSSIBLYdonewithmeyet.

Then a question pops up, one you can’t dismiss: Maybe this grief is about more than the death of your sister? What else is in there … so preserved you refuse to look it in the face?