People and Things We Love

To all the wonderful people who wrote comments or have written me privately to check up on me after my last post: Thank you so much. Thank you for understanding, for supporting the need to rant and rave, for knowing it is not my all, not my sum, only my some.

We have skipped town. Left the building. Flown the country, actually: we are in Vancouver.

It is a perfect and curious place for us to take a vacation. Perfect, because it is filled with all the things we love: snow-capped mountains to view while hiking through them, coastlines dotted with islands to kayak around, a city full of fantastic foodie food, parks to bike in, sights to see, harrowing, scenic drives to navigate at questionable speeds, ferries to ride, and Starwood hotels to stay in for free. Curious, because it is the Pacific Northwest, the place where we most got to know, and then lose our boys. Seattle, Olympic National Park, the Northern coast of Oregon and then ultimately Portland: these were final frontiers for us, the places that haunt our dreams and quiet moments. I have gone over and over those last upright days, searching for clues, trolling for blame amidst the cool air of evergreen forests, jagged mountain ranges, the rainforest lushness that is so prevalent up here and that causes in me both a surge of great love and a profound melancholy. Bruno has the added memories of Portland proper, an outside that I never saw, not until it was all over.

And so we push ourselves to integrate: to continue enjoying the things we love in the kind of places we love, and encorporate our memories of the boys we love and so wish we hadn't lost. We hike and we talk, and Bruno fumes and I weep, and then we keep hiking. We keep climbing the mountains and traversing the oceans and flying over the things in our way to get to the things we love.