Sunlight spills through gaps in lush foliage, wicked and gnarly, growing as it does in a city. Crooked on concrete walkways, reaching hungrily through fences, its leaves, long bony fingers tempting to slip through golden sheers that, on a whim, would take or spare a life. The residual wetness of a city built in a rainforest, its beauty so stunning it’s painful, clashing with the grime of moldering cement, pyramids of crumbling brick, strung out trolley lines, posters stapled to ads taped to flyers wheatpasted to wooden telephone poles, a history told in calcified bands, the continual massive laying of rock upon rock upon rock. Beauty and grit shining from a single body, more intimidating than either alone.

It’s 11: 30 am and I’m getting udon noodles in a Seattle counter-service cafe. I’m the only customer. The employees sleepily peer over their masks, likely annoyed that I’ve come in half an hour after open and half an hour before lunch time. Springy pop music blares out, washing over their muffled voices and lonely eyes. I have no idea how to order here and it’s clear to everyone.

I grab a giant, dark brown plastic lunch tray, a woman places a steaming bowl of noodle soup on top of it and points to slide the tray down the counter to pay at the register. I take the tray up in my hands, carrying it to an empty table, making small careful steps like my ankles are tied together, attempting not to slosh the broth over the edges of the bowl. I sit down alone like it’s my first day of school.

*

On the drive back to Bellingham I notice a small spider the color of sand has started spinning a web on my driver’s side mirror. I accelerate onto the highway and she panics, pulling herself quickly up her web to the corner of the mirror, taking shelter from the wind. There she rides for the remainder of the trip, her old world utterly lost, finding herself now 90 miles from home. Lightyears for a small brown spider. Her new world isn’t so foreign to her old one, but it is nothing familiar.

Deuces, my dog, has been jumpy since we got here. Small noises arouse her from her long repose, up from the shaggy brown renter’s carpet into alert, short low barks, nose up, pacing our second floor digs. There’s a main road just one block over and we have many neighbors with many dogs. The many dogs are nice, but our little duplex village isn’t exactly quiet. I tell her it’s ok that she’s on edge and that eventually she’ll get used to her new surroundings.

*

Where do we go to tease out the chances of our lives? To make fiery confessions from its ailings? We do not go to the temple or the mountain top, nor to some secret grotto. We do not walk barren deserts or kneel at flowing rivers...

I sit leaned over the center console, Natalie holding my head in her lap in a Walmart parking lot. She tells me this will transform me. I cry and say that I don’t want to transform. I want to stay what I have become, shaped by my life in Duluth, my friends, the music scene, the queer community, the deer in my neighborhood, the bitter gray and gales of November, the icy rejuvenance of the lake. Begrudgingly, I became a Midwesterner, an identity I wear like an ugly sweater I’ve had for years but could never get rid of, covering the backs of my hands with its giant sleeves that I slip deeper inside of for warmth, for comfort, for familiarity.

But... I know I really don’t have a choice in the matter.

Whether I want it or not, Bellingham and the people I meet here, the landscape, the wild fruit that hangs heavy and wet from the trees, all will shape me further.

So. All I can really do, in this instance, is to surrender.

This is not to say to lose myself. The transformative forces here will be pushing against something, which is me and everything I am as I have arrived. This too is inevitable. I can’t lose myself, even if I try.

Instead, this is an opening. Everything that I become here will accumulate with everything that I bring from Duluth, into not a new person, but something stratified - the way life builds upon itself. We aren’t rock melted down to thick roiling magma, cooling into new forms. Instead, we are like a mountain or the cleavage of a hillside, layer upon layer built on top of one another through time. Everything new is built upon everything old, and everything old lays the foundation for the newness’ shape.

To begin with, the only reason I became Mara Lovejoy was because I let Duluth transform me. In the wake of a divorce I was hungry for love and fled into the city’s folds, taking refuge at Blush, meeting strangers, dreaming of what would become my life there. What makes Duluth special other than its geography is its myriad whimsy. It warmly invites newness, experimentation, the novice, the curious, the fool to the stage to become something, even if just for a moment. It is ever fresh, low stakes, and deeply important. It allows for art making and participation to be communal acts. Turning towards it rewards the turner, leading them and all who witness to a slow poignant blossom, opening, opening, opening. In that special way we cannot be divorced from the places we live, I’m not sure if there would be a Mara Lovejoy without Duluth. Sure, I would still play music, but as for Mara Lovejoy, who knows? In that sense, Duluth gave me life. It pulled something from the ether and filled me with it. I cherish

who I have become, and as I continue to change, inevitably, with time, with place, with experience, I will be grateful for this precious band in the strata of my history.

*

Did you know that in Lithuania, American dimes are good luck? I’m not sure if this is actually true, but it’s fun to believe. It makes a pleasure and game of walking through life, something so small and almost worthless on its own becoming an auspicious totem.

In my day-to-day life, so unfamiliar now, I find myself leaning more into Woo than I usually would – Or would usually admit, anyway. Finding a pristine copy of Westside Story on vinyl at the thrift store, a bumper sticker referencing a Mary Oliver poem I just heard, a large deer followed by a small deer crossing my neighborhood street. I read these as simultaneously pointing me back towards my life in Duluth and pointing my forward to my life in Bellingham. “You’re in the right place,” they say. “You’re doing the right thing.” They are comforts and something to make meaning of, lighthouses on the dark shore of a strange and alien sea.

I played an open mic last night, something I had to drag myself out of the house to do. The newness was foreboding, but I knew that regardless of the outcome, it would ground me, make me feel tethered and like I’m living in my life. Through performance I push against, and through pushing against I find myself.
People were, as they are in many places, friendly and welcoming, curious of new faces in a place made up of mostly a weekly crowd. In their faces they say they’re glad you’re here and they hope you become part of that crowd. I met someone named Meadow and we talked about sobriety, still hanging out in bars, and what it means to follow your heart heading into a future that looms dark like a gathering thunderhead. On a whim, I asked the bartender if they were hiring, and he said yes, desperately, come tomorrow to talk to the owner.

I get home to my bedroom, lit dimly by a string of Christmas lights draped over the curtain rod. On top of the sheer billowy curtains hanging down, I throw over a beach towel to block out the ambient light from the neighbor’s porch. I take off one of my enormous red cowboy boots, hear something rattle inside, and tilt it upside down. Onto the shaggy brown renter’s carpet, out rolls a tattered American dime.