I had a mini revelation coming back from my stellar weekend in Dallas with Chris. Not only was seeing him and spending time with the fella EXACTLY what I needed (and perhaps what we both needed for a breath of fresh air!) but it all of the sudden made Portland a place I could come back to, and not just this mysterious place I have suddenly been thrown into and felt like someone's constantly watching to see how I do in a strange unfamiliar situation. I called Portland "home" to a stranger on the plane, the first time I've called it such. (I then had an embarrasing moment when I struggled to figure out which volcano I was staring at from the plane window, but I'm PRETTY sure it was Mt. St. Helen's.)
Suddenly Portland catapulted in to real life for me. This is now Where I Live.
So the next struggle becomes taking into account Where I Live and Where Everyone Else Lives. I don't have any family any closer than the midwest now. Got some good friends on the coast, but it's a good 24 hour drive to LA. And I'll be able to go to Colorado in March, I suppose, but none of my Colorado friends (or any of my family, for that matter!) has seen what I do here. Or what Tom does in Seattle. I think the two of us have been so clingly with each other because we feel so isolated from everything and everyone we've known and loved up to this point in our lives.
Does that sound depressing? Because I honestly meant it as a simple matter of fact. You just can't hear the tone of my bizarre train of thought from reading it.
The last time I saw Ma and Pa was in August. Really just 4 1/2 months ago, but it seems longer somehow. I fly out of here in 5 days to see them, and even though I'm leaving a city I've really grown to love and even though Tom and I will have over 12 hours of travel on 3 planes to get there, I honestly can't wait until Christmas day.
I finally met, yesterday, the only other musician I've known who moved here not knowing anyone ahead of time. She took a tour through Portland when she was with the traveling orchestra of Titanic, and loved it here. So when the tour was over, she packed up all her stuff from Cincinatti and hauled it out. No family here, very few contacts. We talked a lot last night about what the adjustment period was like for the both of us. And she knew exactly what it felt like to be stared at blankly after you've told someone that you moved just for the job... no family, no friends there, just wanted to be close to your fiance and still work.
It's bizarre... but then I remembered living in Colorado, and started to think of someone trying to fit in there if I had decided to work in Denver instead. I would have moved to Colorado because my friends were there, and I could probably get networked in to the music world fairly easily. Anyone who moved there on a whim? My gut reaction would have been a blank stare as well.
You don't think ties to a place are so bound within you until you throw yourself into the unfamiliar and objectively witness your reactions. It's a fine life experiment that I'm conducting, I suppose.
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