IX. THE HERMIT
The doors were not the only points of appeal of my last apartment in Seattle, but I’m sure they were a factor in my decision to put down a deposit on a place that was far too small and expensive. It was an old place on Capitol Hill, in what felt like the center of my existence, and so even though I’d only just begun to consider moving, and had no good reason to do so, and no money, I moved into the studio in April 2016.
I first moved to Seattle in 2007. In early 2015, I moved a few miles north of the city. After my first book came out a few months before the move, I’d felt like the city was wrapping around me and crushing me, so I found a big apartment out by the bay and spent the next year there, mostly alone. That is where I lived when I got sober.
I feel an almost physical, chest-pressing pain when I think about my walks in the woods in early winter, listening to The Cure and touching the cedar boughs, almost like I knew I was going to leave the region entirely, although I had no intention of doing so.
I spent a lot of my time up there alone. When I first quit drinking, I worried I would never write again, and it did take me a few months to push through the unexpectedly difficult withdrawals and feel up to doing something beyond surviving. In fall 2015, I began working on an essay about The Oregon Trail II PC game I’d played as a child, an essay I thought was not very good and abandoned for a while. That was the first essay I began drafting that ended up as part of White Magic.
I don’t really understand why I decided to return to the city. It felt wrong and exciting, which is to say it felt familiar, a normal thing I would choose to do.
In that apartment, I felt like I was separated from the city by only the thinnest scrim. I was once street-harassed while I was in my living room.
These two places feel a little holy. I think I was transformed twice, first by sobriety, second by heartbreak. I had been wounded for years, but in 2016, the difference was that I wasn’t too drunk to feel it. That is what my book is about.
In the middle of that year, I went away to a small cabin on a forest island for a few days to write. I wrote hardly anything that was anything, and nothing that was part of this book, which I didn’t know I was writing.
I returned to the city to find a stove element turned on, clearly by a ghost, and to find that my then-boyfriend’s soul seemed to have left his living body. In the Major Arcana, after THE HERMIT comes WHEEL OF FORTUNE. Everything changes.
I miss the evergreens badly. I have begun playing Red Dead Redemption 2 again, and the West feels nearly real here, not just because of the landscape, though that looks real enough that an Oregon news station has shared—more than once?—viewer-submitted screenshots as part of their “Out & About” segment devoted to nature photos. It’s the land and the trees but also the horse and the map.
I ride alone for hours. I’ve been starting to let other people into the world I began to live in two years ago as I exited my book, almost like I’m getting ready for the world to turn over again.