I am so vulnerable to my own heart. It is ridiculous, it really is, the way it keeps trying to eat me from the inside out.

The night we left, after too much stress and too little sleep (and that on the hard floorboards), we could only make it so far before we had to pull off the road into a rest area and sleep, again, crammed in our cars in the cold of Oregon springtime.
And then we made it over that damned pass, into the California morning. Even as far north as Yreka it felt warmer, somehow.

We made it to Redding, and to Chico, into the Sierra foothills, into the almost-nowhere. And then it transpired that my clutch was shredded. We had to tow the truck and trailer the rest of the way to the land with a U-Haul truck and a tow hitch.

God I wept, that first night in California. Leaving Portland was like having a limb ripped away. Maybe every freedom feels like this?

I slept in the back of the truck for two weeks, and the rain poured down. All the stupid things I’d fought so hard to carry with me from my old life got damp, or waterlogged. I bathed in boiled creek water. I drowned my phone in the lake.

Spent a couple months in my uncle’s guest-room, a time full of fitful rest and ablutions and a sort of dreamy ennui. It was like camping on a cliff face: the respite was critical, view was impeccable, and it was impossible to forget the drop. Money dwindled, schemes failed, the thread ran out.

Then it was my mother’s unfinished house for several months, and my ancient, hard, moldy futon. No indoor plumbing (save the toilet, by the grace of God). And my father’s wine and weed, and my brother’s anger, and all the petty, biting cruelties of family life.

It’s so easy to get lost.

Friends, then, and sleeping on a couch. And some hard work that needed doing, and some money. A blessing, basically, and a kindness. And I returned to Watsonville alive again, after being nothinged almost to death, and I gathered my things. Batteries and free house paint from the Santa Cruz dump, and tools, and padlocks and wrecking bars. A cheap air bed and a 12 volt air pump, and a drying rack and sheets and towels.

Back to the land for the last things, the last days, and the send-off. Sleeping in a tent on the already-deflated air mattress on hot nights. The blistering days of foothill summer. Slathered in reeking herbal insect repellant, watching movies on my laptop while Dad’s NPR jazz and pot smoke sifted down from his ratty trailer.

And then I was on the road. Did I ever expect it to go well? Did I really think it could go right? I don’t know. I know that whatever contentment I may have felt in those driving hours had less to do with optimism about where I was going than with the simple fact of my own autonomy and forward motion.

Motel 6 in Eli, Nevada; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Omaha, Nebraska. Did I stay somewhere in Iowa? I can’t recall. Benton Harbor, MI.

And then I was there, again, in Detroit. And my house was, to my partial surprise and significant disappointment, someone else’s home. And so I moved in with these men, for several days. My air mattress was already questionable at this point, and my skin was sticky and the bathtub had been stolen. I padlocked myself into my bedroom on the first night.

There is of course more to say, but the short version is that I left. I was a colonist. I was alone. I was exhausted. I left. Stayed two nights at the Motel 6 in Farmington Hills, MI. A bottle of wine. A shower. A lot of emotional phone calls. The demise of my laptop’s hard drive.

Decided to see the South. Drove to Lexington, Kentucky. The Motel 6 was hosting the participants in a dog show. As I drove to my room I saw in the parking lot an average-sized man and a dwarf woman in deep, animated conversation. The man had a Great Dane on a leash. It was almost too much for me. I had drinks with an old lover. Replaced my hard drive.

Drove across Tennessee to visit friends in Memphis, and had some lovely conversation and cold beer to cut the incredible humidity. Stumbled into Arkansas trying to find my Motel 6. Went to the place where Dr. King was shot and then cried my way to Mississippi.

Found a cousin I barely knew in Atlanta and camped in her living room for several days of getting to know each other. By now the air mattress would stay inflated for about 45 minutes — long enough to fall asleep.

Saw New Orleans alone. Outside my Motel 6 there was an abandoned building with the words “Help we sick” spraypainted on the wall next to one of the balconies. I told the cops at the local McDonalds. They said the message had been there for months.

Drove across the grandeur of Texas in two days. By the time I made it to Phoenix, enduring the discomforts of the 108 degree heat and the zombified marriage of the friends I was visiting, the air mattress had completely given up and was almost entirely deflated after 20 minutes of rest.

Across the burning desert back to California I drove, through Los Angeles and up 101, returning to all of the inertia and uncertainty I had hoped to escape. Not to mention the dreadful futon. It took another two months to land a job in Berkeley, and I was again only able to swing this by the grace of my Berkeley friends. I slept on their kitchen floor for a month, on foam padding.

Found a place of my own in West Oakland. I slept on the floors for the first month. I’ve had a bed since February, with a curvy white metal frame from IKEA. Last weekend I was at Woody’s laundromat, in Oakland, doing my laundry. I was writing while I waited for a cycle to finish, and I realized that I felt like I lived here. Like this was my life now. Oakland. The laundromat. My apartment. I’m not thrilled with every detail of my circumstances, but at least for now, I’m not poised to take flight.

There are some stray dogs running wild that you just can’t help. The chaos and euphoria of freedom has made them mad. You hope that the madness is temporary. You hope for them that they’ll slow and breathe and consider and look around, before they wind up losing limbs in traffic. But all they want to do is run and run and run and run, a terrified ecstatic narcisissm driving them on and on across busy streets and through backyards. You bark at them sternly. ‘Hey!’ And they look up at you out of one wild, wide eye, head lowered and hackles raised, and they either bite or bolt. Most often they bolt, lurching after some folly or nirvana, and leave you feeling that familiar ghost of a feeling: helpless, and afraid for them. And you feel a failure, too, because you offered comfort and care (however temporary) and they were having none of it.

“Love knows no virtue, no profit; it loves, and forgives, and suffers everything because it must. It is not our judgement that leads us; it is neither the advantages nor the faults that we discover that make us abandon ourselves or that repel us.
It is a sweet, soft, enigmatic power that drives us on. We cease to think, to feel, to will; we let ourselves be carried away by it and ask not whither.”
(Sacher-Masoch)

I saw beauty in a fat body for the first time in a Costco sometime between 2000 and 2004. I was standing in line with my mother, and the checker was wearing sweatpants and no makeup and a blond ponytail, and she wasn’t actually beautiful, perhaps, but it was not unpleasant to look at her hips as she moved comfortably to maneuver each item steadily across the code reader. And I’d never found such a sight “not unpleasant” before. Seeing my own loathed fat in every fat body, up till that point I had always recoiled from bodies that reminded me of my own, with which I nevertheless felt some sort of fat kinship.
 
A Costco line moves slowly, big parade floats of food-laden carts arranged in ungainly lines waiting to pass through their designated checkpoint. I had a bit of time to adjust, to experience some wonder. The checker wasn’t huge or elephantine, merely large and rounded. And yet hers was a body which, when put through the automatic sorting process of all bodies into categories of “acceptable” (meaning thin) and “unacceptable” (meaning fat), would have been easily classified as the latter.
 
The moment was a strange one; it estranged me from my own perception. I was simply and suddenly aware of an absence, of an expected response which failed to materialize. I gazed at this stranger’s body and felt no repulsion, no disgust; I was able to see the beauty in it. Scales fell off of my eyes; I could see something in a new way, and it was bizarre and miraculous. I hadn’t been thinking particularly about bodies and beauty at the time, certainly not any more than the usual constant drone of worry cycling with self-righteousness and self-reassurance. This sudden sight came out of the blue.
 
I wondered if the blonde woman was the only object to which this new vision applied, and almost reluctantly removed my gaze from her to cast it about for other bodies. I saw an older Mexican lady, her short three-rolled torso wrapped in a red suit — and my new vision held true. Her body caused me no disgust, no revulsion, no immediate “no!” shouted silently at the unacceptable body. 
 
This alteration of vision has persisted. I don’t see all bodies as beautiful in their entirety; I’m not some fucking PollyAnna of bodily aesthetics. But that automatic, binary sorting process has been quieted. All bodies are not required to be either affirmed or denied. I can see beauty and grotesquerie living side by side in the forms that present themselves to me.
 
But at the same time, the way that this visual capacity descended upon me was so particular, so unexpected, that I cannot expect the same experience to have occurred to everyone. In a brief correspondence earlier this month, anxieties about attraction were summed up as “feelings of inadequacy.” But I don’t feel inadequate at all. I feel entirely adequate. What troubles me are are feelings of unintellgibility. The response to fat bodies are so polarized, so charged with all of these bloodygodawful freighted Kantian legacies. I don’t fear having my advances simply and kindly declined — I fear being flung across the room in a spasm of recoil and disgust, as if I encroached like overconfident vermin in search of warmth.

I fear that I cannot be seen, cannot be read, because for years I simply could not see beauty in a place where it clearly had a foothold — my own body, the bodies of others like me.

The man with whom I am fascinated describes Afghanistan and Iraq, and life in war itself, as simultaneously mundane and in-credible. This is the puzzle implicit in his descriptions and accounts, a trying-to-make-sense to every verbal gesture he makes. These are the things I did. These are the things I had to do and the things I had to see. This is what every day was like. And yet now I am sitting here with you — how can this be?

Cognitive dissonance — the discomfort of holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. My father could not, would not be turned into a killer. He escaped in drugs and ran away in physical space, until “the service” finally let him go. And yet he was ashamed of his escape, ashamed if its terms, felt somehow a failure in his great relief. The combat veteran, in contrast, went where he was told to go, and did what he was told to do. He killed, under the premise (promise?) that this action was righteous, was called for. In war, the story goes, killers are not murderers. I do not know, but I suspect that he cannot quite believe that the state of exception applies to what he has done. He is waiting for punishment, wonders if the punishment is constituted by the torment of memories and uncertainty.

This is one of the untenable choices we offer men — be a killer, or be a coward. Be a brute, or be a failure.
All men are told: “You will do harm.
One way, or the other.
Either you will disappoint us with your lack of resolve,
Or you will disappoint us with your brutality.
There is no exit.”