He was the sort that seemed to affect nonchalance at every moment.  That is, he seemed to affect nonchalance if you were to notice him at all, and most did not; we see those who appear to us, by their own doing or not, through action, presentation, or otherwise, and he was physically normal, not so attractive as to draw the attention of women or the jealousy of other men but well-formed enough to avoid a silent reaction of revulsion or pity, of medium height and build, and he was a modest dresser.  Many simply accepted his inoffensive presence without a specific effort or even thought to do so, and he remained an unremarkable fixture of the background to their lives, on the train, at a bar, moving or not moving on a sidewalk.  He was quite literally a face in a crowd. 

To the more observant stranger or the uninterested coworker or neighbor, he was pleasantly quiet; most weren’t sure whether they’d heard him speak before and forgotten all of the content of what he might have said along with the sound of his voice and, more surprisingly, how what he might or might not have said made them feel.  But he was a quiet neighbor and in a city of eight million people, you don’t have to feel guilty about not getting too worked up about many people aside from yourself.  Besides, having a quiet neighbor is rare enough not to go mess it up by allowing – much less inviting – that person to become something else. 

Some people, though, noticed him, and they would passively comment on his nonchalance if they were asked or struck by it enough to tell.  Say, for instance, some other man sits one stool over at a dive bar in the neighborhood where they both live, this other man recognizing him as living somewhere around there at the very moment a particularly beautiful woman comes between them to order a drink, brushing them both with her shoulders, her laugh with a musical quality, her hair cascading over her shoulders and smelling delightful, a rare one in a million type beauty that you wouldn’t typically find in a dive bar in their working-class neighborhood and yet here she is, ordering a dark microbrew of all drinks – this other man takse it all in on the peripheral, leans over and makes some remark to her, and maybe she thinks it’s clever and ribs him back a little bit – or more likely it’s crass or boring and she laughs without amusement – regardless, she grabs her drink and walks into oblivion, never to be seen again by either of them.  Naturally, this other man looks over at his stool partner, the only other witness to this amazing beauty and his wisecrack and can you believe the goddamn women in this city, but damn is she beautiful am I right, I mean have you seen this woman before, only to find at first that he’s not even looking, he’s sitting on the stool  and only at the sound of this other man’s voice after a slight pause and a sip of his beer does he turn with a barely audible breath and respond not with a I hear you, brother or a supportive get back in there, she’s not left the bar and she didn’t order her drink between us for nothing or even some condescending smirk at what this other man’s is realizing was a pretty feeble attempt to interact with a woman leagues beyond his league, but instead with a pure look, right into and possibly past the eyes, that makes the rejected man think he heard and saw the entire interaction and yet thought nothing of it, not about this woman’s beauty or the subtle touch of her shoulder against his or the comment the other man suddenly realizes was totally boneheaded, not about any of it.  And then the other man watches with some now horror as he nonchalantly turns back to the bar and points at the bartender for his tab.

Living out here we ain’t got much of a context to explain something aside from the land that sustains us and the things we can see from the farthest reaches of the land we got.  Not too many varied ways of describing any particular thing.  But I’ve learned at least one thing from this basic world – this world you’d call basic – watching each season come and bring the things that it brings, some of it, the general sense of it, you can expect, and the details that are new each time around.  And then the season passes and it takes a whole lot of what it brought and as if it was greedy it takes some of what was there before it ever came at all, too.  It takes all that except what you get your hands grasped around and hold on to in the meantime, which is why we live out here in the first place, minding the land.  And which is all there is – the meantime that is.  The mean time.

I know you’re gonna leave.  I know you want bigger things that what you can find out here.  But let me tell you this one thing I’ve learned before you go off chasing what we know you’re chasing.  The growing warm you feel inside of you ain’t nothin’ but weeds.

The winter’s been right cold – it always is and it only seems colder each year.  Not to say it was cold or it wasn’t cold, but that’s sure the way it feels, that each one is colder and longer than the last.  I know that well by now.  And now the sun is coming up on the top of the sky and it’s warming up and the rain is coming around more often and all this leads to the green stretching out into everything, everything we can see.  Things are growing, even the things we can’t see.  The weeds come up first – they always come up first.  And boy it feels good to see things growing again, to feel them growing again, even the weeds.  They’re someplace first and everywhere soon.  It’s not just that they can pop up damn near any spot of ground that grow anything at all, but that they will.  They got an undeniable will, these weeds – a will without much thought.  You can see it as they bloom and spread and bloom and spread and bloom, fast as a thing can, a true machine of nature.  Hell the weeds might even look pretty good to you if you didn’t know any better, hadn’t seen them before.  And when that spring comes, when the winter gasps and claws and finally ceases, it’s easy to forget that you know what it is, that you know what’s happening out your window, what’s the thing that’s spreading around everywhere. 

Here’s what I want you to remember.  I was just setting it all up, up ‘til now.  Here it is, I want you to mind this good.  Weeds are no cash crop.  They’ll damn near overwhelm you in a wash of warmth and vital green and make you forget the truth, that they ain’t gonna sustain you.  They come up so fast they outgrow themselves – they got weak stalks, and you can walk through the yard and break them down at the root without even knowing it if you don’t look down at your feet.  What you got to realize is even if it’s the weeds that tell you it’s spring, it’s the spring that’s important.  It’s what the weeds mean, what they signal to us.  And if you can remember the season, you can follow it to the next season and the next season after that, the never-ending sequence that isn’t a sequence but a pattern, and seeing that pattern is the only chance you got to remember it.  Ain’t nothing ever growed that didn’t die, wither and brown and die.  It’s the path of every thing.  Don’t waste the time you got on weeds.

I thought of the last time I was happy.  I think.

About fourteen months ago I was happy for some time on a return flight from Seattle.  This is when I was a middle manager in the logistics division of a natural gas utility company.  You know which company it is I think, but if you haven’t noticed in our meetings I’ve made a little game of avoiding saying its name.  Honestly I hope to completely forget it someday.  I don’t know if that’s healthy or even possible, but there doesn’t seem to be anything of value for me in the memory except sadness and, well, sadness stopped being pleasurable a long time ago and as far as learning something from it, I’m a bit oversaturated.  Anyway, they sent me to a bunch of these management theory conferences.  Which I hated, but that’s not really important.

Note that fourteen months ago was about three weeks before mywifeex-wifedamnitthen-wife filed her papers.  And while I was blind-sided by the news, it didn’t help how she delivered it - a very shortphoneconversationstatement over the phone with two hours to go at work on a Thursday - and also I just never thought something that was really possible, which she helped me learn is an offensively naive lack of foresight - I was blind-sided by the news, but things were distinctly not great.  In fact, if I hadn’t realized that our marriage was over sooner, I should have realized then, which of course I didn’t.  The things Ihave hiddenallow to be hiddenhide from myself.  All of the things I remember I want to forget but can’t or don’t know how and the rest I forget before I even know in the first place.

That morning I had to rush past a long line of angry people waiting for their flights and convince security to let me through while some airline attendant called my name over the loudspeaker.  I was somewhere in that gray area between intoxication and hangover. We’d had a fight the night beforeI’d spent one-fourth of the previous night defending my heart from her foot which had come through the phone and stomped its way through my chest and three-fourths trying and failing to get hammered enough to forget, one and a half drinks at the bar and then one and a half bottles of wine I bought from a gas station near the hotel.  Suffice to say I felt like a ghost on the plane in a frightening combination of ways. 

I didn’t mention this, but the weather was absolute shit in what I’ve always heard is typical Seattle fashion (although I’ve been to the city three times and had very nice weather twice).  So after drunkenly harassing half of the employees in the airport to help me catch my flight on time, we waited on the runway for another fifteen minutes while rain came down in blinding sheets.  Fifteen minutes of death glares from everyone on the plane with whom I made the mistake of making eye contact.  Which I deserved for smelling like alcohol and shit.  And for failing at my obligation to arrive at the flight one hour before takeoff and for doing what I found out later was $600 in damage to my hotel room and for responding so poorly to what I felt like was an all-out attack but what was actually the natural reaction from my then-wife to a retrospective compilation of failures and for sending an email to my boss that would have merely made me a very unpopular middle manager at the natural gas utility company had I stopped at one email and for everything else.  But not for the weather.

The plane took off without ceremony.  There was a mother sitting next to me, holding an infant, and on the other side there was a large man in a suit.  I recognized him from the conference.  They were both leaning almost imperceptibly away from me.  That’s one of the lowest lows I can remember, sitting on that plane, in between those nice people who didn’t deserve to deal with my shit, on a plane full of people who didn’t deserve to deal with my shit, and the rain was still coming down in sheets and the plane started experiencing some turbulence as we breached the clouds at about 5500 feet and I remember wanting the plane to just go down, waiting for an errant bolt of lightning or some confused bird to take out an engine, for the plane to lurch and lose altitude and for the masks to unfurl uselessly in front of our faces,  and then I looked over at the mother who was sort of grimacing and the baby who was smiling and struggling to reach the seatback pocket and then I closed my eyes and squeezed my fists and just viscerally hated everything in myself and everything else in relation to myself.

And I opened my eyes and we’d emerged from the clouds.  Out the window and over the banked wing the sun was suspended, brilliant and unobstructed.  The mother shielded her eyes, turned her head away, and I just kept staring, even as it burnt my eyes.  I kept looking until she pulled down the shade.  And then I looked at the ghost of the sun, burnt and projected onto the inside of my eyelids, until I awoke as the plane touched down four hours later.  That’s the last time, I think. 

Sarah rides the public bus three times each day. 

The first time is in the morning, a twenty-six minute ride from the stop two blocks north, three blocks west from her apartment to the stop one block beyond her office building, where she disembarks and backtracks the one block over the hot grates.  Sarah is not what one might call a morning person.  At this time in the morning, her normal self-consciousness has yet to reassemble itself fully after completely diffusing the night before at the exact moment her thoughts heaved and gave way to sleep.  She completes her morning functions.  She is presentable and will become increasingly so as the morning moves on and her actual and knowable and deep red vitality catches up with the mindless but ordered and thorough preparation of her body, her face, her hair.  This all occurs without a scant thought; she steps and steps and climbs on and sits and leans as commuters come and go and briefly dozes and is shaken and stands for a woman older than she and quickly sits for a man either less polite or slightly slower than she and climbs off and walks and feels the hot air warm her every step.  Not once does she think, really.

The second time Sarah rides the bus is in the late afternoon or early evening, depending on the erratic though invariably foul mood of her immediate supervisor, though she recognizes, sometimes with gratitude, that an unpredictable and unpleasant mood is better than the obstinate and disgusting pseudo-sexual advances that several of her close friends receive from their supervisors.  She notes that this is one of the few instances in which she is thankful for the faint ten-year-old acne scars at the base of her cheeks, for the faint jiggle in upper arms, for the flaws that seem either to have slowed or stopped accumulating altogether or to have been reconciled in some unknown way.  This, the second time Sarah rides the bus each day, is more eventful than the first.  The self-consciousness is back, having reformed anew by the nine o’clock meeting.  Sometimes her face is flush and skirt askew from the catching of the afternoon bus, whose schedule she still does not fully understand, even after four years of riding it each day.  Sometimes her face is flush and skirt askew from enduring the wind that always seems to blow right through the bus stop, regardless of season, temperature, or specific weather pattern, and from sitting on the bench with her legs crossed tightly as she waits for the bus, which sometimes she does not need to run and catch or fails to run and catch.  The wind, she notes, is a more tolerable aspect of the bus stop than nearly any other, including her fellow commuters and the time that she spends waiting.  Time seems very tangible and unpleasant at this bus stop.

Sarah climbs aboard the bus and sits.  To distract herself from the work she is carrying with her, the work one-o’clock Sarah promised to finish before the end of the day much to the chagrin of four-o’clock Sarah, who actually knows by one-thirty that she will not finish this work – to distract herself from these thoughts, she looks at her fellow bus riders.  She attempts to look without reserve or embarrassment or judgment, though sometimes these sinister elements sneak into her observations, distract her from the reality of the people on the bus. 

Sometimes, men look at her on the bus, in different ways.  Sometimes twice, up-then-down-then-away.  Sometimes they look because they are trying not to look at something more compelling but also more embarrassing – another woman, perhaps, more beautiful but arrestingly so, knowingly so even.  And so they look at Sarah.  Sometimes they look at her hungrily, looks about which Sarah generally feels ambivalent, depending on the looker. 

Once a man looked at Sarah in another way but she did not know how to describe it then and certainly does not know how to describe it now.  This particular memory falling into the same trap as other memories, where she remembers not the thing itself, only her response to the thing – in this case, her response was to deny her substantial urge to speak with the man, to open her mouth and say, it, something – she denied this urge because Sarah believes that the only thing worse than a bad thing is a good thing since any good thing to come of saying it to the man she would take with her as she stepped off the bus or else later.

The third time Sarah rides the bus is the return trip from the park to which she walks each evening to sit and from which she does not remember ever thinking to walk home alone.