The snail slinks along

The rain falls heavier

On his house.

                    This isn't a revelation.

This place isn't just this:

The best brunch spot on a Sunday, where to get your downward dog on and become utterly enlightened, the myriad of coffeehouses to lose yourself in, how organically "unique" the next recipe can be or how much money one can throw at a person's sign on Burnside in hopes of bridging the gap between poverty and perseverance of the 9 to 5. That hostile sentence stops me in my tracks. My destination is some place on Hawthorne I frequent for tea because I too am a consumer. I do not throw pennies but smiles in the direction of strangers in hopes someone might hear me thinking "I understand", to feel as though we have shared the same definition of connection, full of remorse at my fortune, at my own dealt hand, my own dominoed decisions. In the same breathe I don't carry the burden of 10,000 things or the world on my shoulders. I'm one being. I desire to snap photos of these moments that feel substantially bleak and real at once, to tell myself this is why I'm living, of the man on his bike with bungee cords around his house, or the young girl nodding off in weekly group, the sun slanting in a little too sharply, the murmurings of an elderly woman in an alleyway, the buildings lined with flowering vines, but theres no way to capture that, so I slip inside a coffeeshop to consume, plan, contradict, scheme for happiness, ask for more hot water.

Portland, while you are the City of Roses and rain and eclectic upbringings, and flourishing creativity, you are also this, caught not in still frame but hindsight:

Sharing dark chocolate outside of New Seasons with Elsa who says she's 20 and looking for a place to stay, and you share simply because it's your favorite and it might be hers too but maybe she doesn't know it and her sign and eyes and bruised face says she's homeless but maybe she's not really and you don't ask her life story, just where she's from, a question that leaves you yourself unsettled, and you're both sitting there cross-legged on the pavement watching the people come and go with their grocery bags full of food and hopping on their bikes with their babies and big grins, and the wind stands still somehow, and she says "Portland", and it all becomes too much to be uncomfortable and not know what to say, like you're somehow better than someone who threw money into her jar and so you leave and feel sickened and saddened all over again and get on the 14 back home.

The woman who says she just got her teeth fixed and she's sending her picture to a friend because it's been over 20 years since she's had teeth and she's telling you because she's nervous and spilling her life story and that she'll try to wait to get home to cry, and you simply say "do it when you gotta do it" and she tells you that's the nicest thing and you wonder and know the answer at once at how many people are holding that hurt in.

A homeless man

The sea

Inside his eyes.

To take a picture would be too consumeresque.

Even writing these words feels too cheaply easy.