Downtempo

The rains have returned to Seattle, marking the close of summer and the slow downfall into the monotone gray of winter. My wife said she worried how I was going to adapt to the months of grayness. When I first moved out here less than four years ago. Trust me, I told her; I've been through months of hellish heat and smothering humidity when I lived in Houston. I lived through months of frigid Chicago winters where it got dark at 3 p.m. and your toes never got warm until April, a month when the dirty snow lumps which clung to large parking lots and the chalky dead-gray no-mans land between sidewalk and driven road finally melted.

I could handle three months of gray and muted greens. I could handle snow three days out of the year. If it snows...I mean, really snows...like more than eight inches sticking to the ground (an average winter day in central Michigan, if I remember my Midwest winters right), Seattle gets deserted and quiet, like something from sci-fi disaster movie where some traveler comes into the dead metropolis and wonders what happened...just before the crazed mutant survivors descend on him.

I yearn for days like that, mostly because I never take a day off. I have more than seven weeks of vacation time accrued, thanks to a sweet union deal and a spectacular immune system. I'm saving it for holiday travels to the appropriate parental homes (we switch off every other holiday between my folks and my wife's...this year, my folks get us at Thanksgiving, hers get us for Christmas).

But these days, my life has fallen into a gray routine to fashionably match the weather. The cloud that's hanging over me now is the distressing news from a friend out east (compared to Seattle, everything else is "out east." That, or "down south"). She's going through a rough patch connected to a guy she knows. Like most things either wonderful or painful, it's about love, but this is the painful species since it's an unrequited love. She is drawn so strongly to a certain someone and he up and got engaged to someone else. She said she doesn't want him as a boyfriend, but just wanted to get the sensation that, at one time, he cared for her with the intensity that she did for him.

I imagine her pouring all this energy and want into a black hole that will just crush them into a singularity, never acknowledging the passion or the source involved. I ache for my friend, knowing what she went through because I, like the rest of us, have just burned to have that certain someone respond in kind, and no matter how hard you try, it just won't happen. It's the dirty little secret of loving someone: When you put your heart out there, sometimes it won't be noticed. Sometimes you try and give it your all, and it means nothing. He or she won't notice when your heart is there, and worse, when you leave, the one you desire won't notice when your gone.

My friend says that she'll be okay, that she can fight off these phantoms. I hope so. I don't want to see her in pain. I don't want her to cry about this. She just got her master's degree and a couple of her poems are on the way to being published. To see someone that creative and that strong get her heart tossed around just makes me wince because you want to take it away, let her forget this guy and start her new life. But she's unemployed and stuck with a lot of time to think, and when your heart is fragile and you feel like you are out of options, time can make something like unrequited feelings just burn humiliating and self-defeating scars across your soul.

If she wasn't so far away, I'd invite her over for pizza and bad sci-fi films on DVD which we could mock incessantly (we are both acolytes of the First Unified Church of Tom Servo). If the dot-com industry didn't burst under its financially delusional weight, I'd get her a job out here, so she could have people to hang out with and start roots of her own. Even though the guy who played with her heart is out here, I could show her that Seattle is big enough for her, too.

The clouds out here hide a lot of things. They hide broken hearts. They give you cover to build a new life when no one is watching. Out here, even in the horrid traffic and stuck job market, you can come out and hide among the trees, remaking yourself and hiding what you once were in some primal forest that will be here long after you are gone. My friend could transmute her hurt into a common stone she could drop into the ocean and forget about.

But, I suppose she'll find her way in time. Whatever was torn and broken in her will knit together again, the same way broken bones do...into a substance that was stronger than before.

French Word of the Day

pas de deux (pah duh duh): "Dance for two"; metaphorically, the jockeying for position between two opponents.