Tacoma

I once described my hometown as "like closing your eyes and turning on your fingers." I could, I think, describe a lot of things that way -- or at least a lot of remembered things -- but Tacoma is special. There's something very physical -- fingerable - about memory. Very tactile and drawn and strung out. And Tacoma is so much in my memory that it feels like it operates my bones; draws my knees up and my elbows in when I walk, pushes on my ribcage when I breathe. I love this town. I'm not sure I love living in it, but I do love it. I feel pulled in every direction when I'm home -- towards Ruston Way and the sea-sucked piers; or the downtown warehouses, with the turn of the century advertisements so light against brick walls they look like hallucinations; or Northend trees and houses I saw once a very long time ago, and then remembered that first look every other time I passed for decades, til the sight of them is layered in me like levels of skin. Every street I move down, I want to see what's on either side as well. I want South Tacoma Way and Commerce Street and Verde, the whole of each, to be around me at all times (a geographic impossibility, but not a conceptual one) and I want Wrights Park and Point Defiance and the Narrows Bridge in reach. To hand. It feels like dancing feels. It's an odd embodiment, maybe. It's joyous though.