The challenges of the past two years have changed the way we live, the way we work, and the way we show up for each other. They have also given us a rare chance to collectively reimagine our future. Through the Reimagine Seattle Storytelling Project we invite community members to reflect on their current experiences in Seattle, how they have been impacted by recent events, and their hopes for the future of our city.
Seattle Sonata (legato, every note legato)
by Arianne True
I - razbliuto It’s hard to be in love with someone who can change so much. My city left me behind chasing a seat at the table when our table was already set, overflowing with possibility and art and people who can’t afford to live here anymore. I live an hour away now and don’t know how to feel when I see her. Something like longing. Something like disappointment. Something I worry is like a word I learned once at her side, the Russian word that names the feeling you have for someone you once loved but no longer do. I worry that’s true. II – in Russian There’s no such word in Russian. You can say, “I once loved you but no longer,” but there’s no shorthand for it. No sum up. Despite being in the books of so many experts, so many linguists — no such feeling in its source language. Best guess: a typo in a 60s tv show. Replicated somehow to now. A not-Russian word that only exists in English. III – object permanence I feel home, though, in some of the same places. Pioneer Square and the Seattle Center, bookends of a past continually overwritten and a future imagined once, two half-truths preserved in architecture. These buildings at least feel real to me, like they’ll still be there when I turn around. It’s hard to feel steady when you’re surrounded by disappearances, a constantly changing view. How much was ever really there? I trust the old bricks and concrete most in this city. [Still not more than the trees that grow up the ravines.] IV – no what it’s hard to tell someone you left everything they would’ve needed to change for you to keep wanting them. you shouldn’t try. living things change, it is just hard to love living things (harder not to) the city is a living thing, you know. like I am a living thing to the microscopic creatures that populate my body who make it somewhere I can live too. no me without them. no city without who? hard to say for a city bleeding out. what are you losing? when will you notice? and what will you do then? V – somehow it’s not happening here but Sometimes I have to speak so plainly that my voice gets lost in the words. It’s to be understood when you’re swimming against misconceptions. It still only works when someone will listen. Is willing to hear. VI – why here My writing exists because this is home. Me born to another city is another artist, who knows her medium? Something about this place keeps breathing me words. Maybe it’s the dense undergrowth, so many places for a whisper to catch and hide, to wait for you. So easy to move slow here, easy to spend an hour on the bus or twenty minutes walking. Cars dull my senses, speed me up to where I can’t catch the details anymore. I write more when I am slow in the world, and this home made that so easy for so long. It’s harder to get here now, but when I can the whispers are still waiting, falling with the pine needles or pushing up with irises, caught in the air of a bumblebee’s fuzz as they sleep in a rosebud. Other places have flowers, but these ones know my name. VII – whole-body ear I wear thinner shoes now and can feel the streetcar fifty feet away, every move and stop spreads sensation across the soles of my feet. This place always teaching me new ways to listen. VIII – what about the other colors Thick pigeons flock and split like a grey kaleidoscope no one is turning in the one hour we have of snow. So many land together three stories up, a whole crenellation of plump birds. The rest must’ve gone west somewhere, maybe past the clock tower, I can’t see them now. IX – cadence I think what I want is for hometown to mean something. Something tangible, more than longing or nostalgia, to mean something with a body. Some kind of right to live in your home. Some new knowing (not new to me) that these streets were parents for some of us. Some of us were raised by buildings and bus routes and empty auditorium stages, by old old trees, by blackberries and sticky rhododendron blooms and the salmon that come home every year to become the stream again. Some of us were raised by pavement and school fields and drainage ditches. By strangers and being a stranger show after show. By the water that runs over all of them. (us.) None of these are just images. This is not a poem, it’s a map. This is not a poem, it’s a lineage. I am telling you my family. I am telling you my home. I am telling you one of the saddest things I know, that none of that is allowed to matter more than money in the city that’s been built here. Maybe what I miss is like parents before you find out they are only human too. I am not surprised by the changes here anymore. But I am surprised by the things no one notices. I live in shock that we have no right to our home.
