the exit door.

I arrived in this place a few days more than a week ago. I had been here but once a few years prior, on a four day weekend trip with my father to meet his cousin. They hadn’t seen each other in a few days shy of forty years, as they were both the wanderers.

She had left the Northeast to reach Washington, specifically Capitol Hill, with policy on her mind. Contrastingly, my father left with no intention; his father had given him a one way ticket to Oklahoma. He was under the false impression that he would eventually return to Oregon, though this was not a part of his father’s plan. Once my dad realized how much he loved the heat and loathed the cold, he warmed up to the idea of staying in the Sooner State.

Our roads finally met (theirs again, hers and mine for the first time) during the month of May, two-thousand and eight. At the time, I was working at Starbucks, and perusing tickets to South Korea to teach English for a second. The morning of the trip, my father and I managed to miss our six am flight, and were redirected through Denver on a plane to Dulles, the same airport we were specifically instructed not to fly into. The long story made short is that we all had a really good time, and my cousin made it her agenda to get me out of Tulsa.

This is the part where I feel it’s quite appropriate for me to say just how much I love Tulsa, and also, how important it has been for me to let go of it. I have this vision in my head sometimes of a small diner in a small town. I see the local police officer eating his eggs and the character waitress taking the regular orders. She started doing it, what seems like to her, before the invention of the wheel, and the people that walk in each day look forward to knowing they will see a familiar face when they enter. It’s a place where the customers are known and valued. Comfort, as well comfort food, are served in droves. In my vision, I enter, stand on a chair, and in the most passionate tone I can muster, “GET OUT HERE! TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT! VARY YOUR EXPERIENCES AND ORDER YOUR EGGS A DIFFERENT WAY!” And this is Tulsa to me. It’s my diner, and was, in so many ways, a sincere season of comfort that was completely necessary. I was known and valued. I had my places and my “regular orders”. Friendships were abundant, as was fun. And then there wasn’t anywhere else to go, save the tacky diner bathroom or the exit door.

After the season had ran it’s cycle, I headed for the door, though I didn’t run. It’s a truly wonderful place that doesn’t merit an unnecessarily speedy exit. I was headed, eventually here, where I am now.

First I had to run a marathon, and also fall in love with Seattle. Before leaving Tulsa, my friend Matt cautioned me, “Be careful in Seattle,” with a look of concern about his face. “Why?” said I, perplexed. “Because you won’t want to leave.” Had it not been for the lovely Pamela, who resides in Watertown, a suburb of Boston, and the fact that I was leaving Seattle to see her, I would have begged one of my family members or acquaintances to please. let. me. stay.

I left the city that far exceeded my expectations in the dark hours of an unassuming Monday morning, and spent the next eight hours in a state of exhaustion, hobbling my way through airports and time zones. My string of days in Boston were essential for my sanity. I had been bobbing around from acquaintance to acquaintance, perfecting the task of making potentially awkward situations as comfortable as possible. I craved the feeling of being in the presence of someone who knew...knows...me. Boston was full of goodness: food, history, beautiful things, the water, accents and wonderful characters. Characters like Connie, for example, my server at Strip T’s, a little cafe famous for their chocolate cake and caesar dressing, and the two men with thick Boston accents on the bus reminiscing about their old bar tender, “what was his name,” over on so and so street. And from there, the joy of Greyhound transportation. A twelve hour day that began at four-twenty-five, entailing a bus ride to the subway to the bus station to another bus station to another bus station to a taxi-cab to the where I am staying now.

And for the first week and a half, I reacted as someone from an outside perspective would assume I would. From my perspective, I just felt strange, out of mind, and out of place. I was bothered by this, and also confused.

A few weeks before I left, I was lucky enough to see my dear friend Melinda marry. Prior to the wedding ceremony, Melinda and eleven other ladies she is crazy about piled into vehicles and drove to a dreamy cabin in the woods, which was also a foreign environment, as none of us had actually ever been there. Within minutes, some of the ladies had all of the groceries put away, garlic sauteing in a pan, and fleet foxes playing their dinner making tunes. I walked in to this scene, immediately became uncomfortable, and made my way to the front patio, where pine trees served as the official backdrop, and the wind and voices of friends were the pre-dinner tune.

The following evening, I found myself at ease in the kitchen, glass of wine inches away, making a vegan pie crust while brownies baked in the oven very near.

Through the process of rolling out the dough that had been refrigerating until it was ready to use, I began to realize why I had been uncomfortable the previous evening, and why I was just fine replicating the same behavior and scene that had forced me out of the house twenty-four hours before.

I am drawn to the stages of things because it’s a part of myself; the crust refrigerating, after the apples and pears have been sliced, while they are being tossed with sugar and lemon juice, ginger and cinnamon, and corn starch. I don’t mind that things take time, because I do too. In my world, the previous evening’s chefs were too comfortable with a strange environment much too soon. I needed time to adjust, as well as assess the situation and my surroundings. I had to walk on the floor with my shoes off, and find out where the forks were because I needed one, not just because I wanted to know. I won’t ever buy an apple peeler-corer-slicer. I am comfortable with a knife, and the pace at which hands slice an apple.

Walking into this section of my drift, into this luxurious house and queen size bed with sizable thread count sheets, in a district where streets go by the names of states, was much like walking into that foreign kitchen full of comforting music and familiar smells; it didn’t feel wrong, as I was surrounded by goodness. It just felt too soon.

This isn’t just a kitchen. It was an upheaval, and it is a whole new kind of life. Alleviating the strange and out of place-ness takes, well, time. So that’s what I am giving myself...pure old fashioned unadulterated keep it at a steady pace sort of time.