Dear AZ,

I miss you.  I didn't want to.  I never planned that, but I do.  I miss your stars, your people.  Your stucco.  Your bio-crust.  Your balance of independence and abandon.  The desert is a rather isolating place - the climate makes you feel cut off from everything, the only pulsing, perspiring bag of water alive for miles.  Before I left - though my work was not hard - my hands had begun to crack at the knuckles.  The desert breaking at my boundaries, wanting in.

Here, though, water is everywhere, and it makes you feel like a cell in a much larger organism.  Bounded somehow, in some dimension - but the rain mists and blurs the edges of your vision, so you couldn't see to the end of things, anyway.

It's been raining here every day since before I arrived.  Not a constant rain; it wanes and softens sometimes only to return to drum down collars and obscure glasses.  I'm reminded of a Ray Bradbury story in which astronauts on a lonely, perpetually precipitating planet slowly go mad.  One by one they turn their faces up and open their mouths to drown in it.

There's humus here.  Boy, is there humus.  Leaves slowly liquefying; invertebrates wrinkled and mucousy chowing down on the soggy cornflake mess.  In the desert, it takes an orange peel years to decay, first desiccating then slowly wearing to dust physically and chemically.  Here, the color seeps out first - pale flesh-colored rinds half-hidden in mud and swollen with moisture are common among the roadsides and bus stops.  Drop a seed and it will grow, if it doesn't rot first.

I've already mentioned how the process of going to Arizona was like getting a new body.  But it wasn't a birth, not yet.  Being there was like the process of cells coming together, coalescing into organelles, organs, organism.  I was constructing myself piece by piece, a postmodern Prometheus.  I feel like Portland is where my systems will receive current for the first time, will begin to send and receive information.  This place that I am born into.  Perhaps I should've expected a water birth - my entrance splashing the same salinity of ocean and tears.  I hope I can learn to be both solar and hydro-powered, but my parts are made of pretty strong stuff.  Whatever energy courses through them, they power a beating heart.