mask on, fly out, pack up, come home

after 3 years, i've officially moved out of Seattle.

Greetings all!

After having executed the aforementioned risky, exhausting move from Seattle to my parents’ place in San Jose, I had little time or energy to write and publish this post by Sunday as expected. Consider this Wednesday publication a one-off hump day gift.

As always, I’m grateful to you for opening this up and reading it. You’ll be happy you did!

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Last week, I moved out of Seattle.

I flew back to that rainy, hilly, antisocial town for four days to stuff essentials (T-Shirts and Wii games) into four suitcases, shuttled back and forth to UPS to mail away heavies and delicates (books, speakers, and Instant pot), give away useless items (couch, coffee table, lamps), and embark on my next adventure (lockdown at parents’ house).

My dad sleeping on a floor covered in various fabrics on the last night after we gave everything else away. He claims it was “actually not that bad.”

The Toll

A home feels like an extension of yourself (which I wrote about a year ago), so naturally, moving out feels like a breakup, with all the good and bad that comes with that.

Specifically, I wanted closure for my time there. But how would I even do that? Do I call up all my friends in the area or meet them at a distance to wave with a taut smile? Do I head to my favorite neighborhood haunts and relive past mundanities? Do I wrap little Thank You cards in compostable paper and tuck them in sidewalk cracks in a gesture of (invasive) appreciation for a city that housed my formative years?

Those all may sound rather dramatic. That’s because all goodbyes are. They imply the end of something, which is never completely true. Your time with a person, place, job, or experience persists. Someone somewhere (maybe it’s you) remembers it fondly, or has paid tribute somehow. Lessons from it have taken hold in you and fostered your growth.

I know this because 1) I’m personally bad with goodbyes (too long or too abrupt—just look at how I end newsletter posts), and 2) this isn’t actually my first goodbye to Seattle, so I knew what to expect. I spent the summer of 2016 there for an internship. On my last day, I walked to the overpass of the huge I-5 highway adjacent to the house I was Airbnb’ing and listened to Sufjan Stevens while watching traffic buzz beneath me.

And wow-wee! What an incredibly underwhelming experience.

It was the kind of self-romantic goodbye a robot might’ve learned from watching a few Richard Linklater films. I remember standing there in the drone of nighttime traffic, staring out downtown, and waiting for something to happen—waiting for some emotion to grab me.

Of course, nothing did. I must’ve looked like a weirdo to passersby, some kid bobbing his head tensely while leaning over an expressway railing.

The truth is, that first summer in Seattle was truly painful. I hated my internship, avoided people out of fear, and spent most of my time shut inside playing video games and scrolling through the web. I’d built a colorful idea in my mind of how living “abroad” should be but gave up on making it real.

Now fret not—the past 3 years have been much better than those 3 months. The lesson, however, is the same, which I learned the hard way that first time: nostalgia is a trap.

It can make an absolutely dung experience look great in retrospect. It’s a convenient, too-good-to-be-true feeling because it benefits from isolation. You can easily long for the past laying in bed alone with nobody else to point out any negative aspects. The loneliness of it can even make it appear like a deep spiritual experience when it’s not. I remember thinking that by dwelling on my past experiences, I was “tracing my own destiny,” and “nobody else would ever understand.”

With all this in mind, I didn’t want to do anything bombastic to fare Seattle well. I was done with the place. We’re in a pandemic. Let’s just pack up and get out.

Well, actually…OK fine, I’ll admit it—I took a walk through downtown Capitol Hill to take a mental snapshot of everything before I bounced. I even…I’m not proud to admit this, but I even walked by my previous apartment building to catch some old memories.

But it was only 45 minutes! And it was mostly to exercise off the frozen pizza that I’d bought with spare change accumulated over these past 3 years. There’s definitely a metaphor in there somewhere, but I’ll let you connect those dots.

Either way, it was a tighter goodbye than before (no cheesy soundtrack, no forced emotion), and I’m satisfied with my strength in the face of a potential nostalgic relapse. Tossing my old Polaroid camera a couple days prior helped.

Now all this anti-nostalgia sentiment doesn’t mean that there’s no way to say honor a personal experience. It just has to be authentic. I’ll get to that in a second, but first, some other cool things for y’all to chew on.

Other Cool Things!

• Nikil wrote an album feature for the lovely Quelle Chris album Innocent Country 2, published on solstice.fm. I urge you all to check it out:

• Many posts ago, I mentioned organizing a writing workshop for Indian American kids. I held my first virtual one on May 16 with a group of 25 kids in 6th and 7th grades. Below are two of the adorable written responses from the kids to the prompt, “Choose an object and pretend it’s real. What are its thoughts, feelings, hopes, and dreams?”

Basketball

I have a very interesting life. My only purpose is to provide fun for others, so that’s what I wish to do. If I am flat, then I can’t provide as much fun, so I always want to be full with air. Because of this, my favorite food is air. I have a nice life providing satisfaction to others, but the more I am used, the more I am worn down. Still, I have a fulfilling purpose.

THE TISSUE BOX

When I was young, I was a small tree. I was happy in the woods, swaying with my friends around me. But one day, while I was playing away, a noise came upon me. The choppers were here and I yelled, “Just let me be!” But they didn’t hear. They swept me off the ground, and I felt like I have leaped bounds. But there was an empty feeling when I was lifted above. I was going to miss my family and friend’s love. I was taken to a factory, where there were machines that shaped me. Now I sit here all alone, my feeling stripped to the bone. And I help people sad or mad. Even though I have been given this gift, I still long for more. I long for my end to begin and to go to the factory once again. Maybe I’ll meet somebody I know, but it’s ok, I keep my hopes low.

Some Seattle Highlights

Anyways, one way I like to honor my own experiences is by journaling them. This time, I want to share some of my favorite experiences in Seattle with you guys.

• Staring at the gorgeous view of downtown Seattle from my first apartment’s rooftop balcony (circa August 2017).

  

• Seeing my first live wrestling show. Super amateur, but it’s definitely one of those things you’ve gotta do before you die to claim that you’ve really lived.

• Having weekly writing jams with my friends, where we’d gather and write for 45 minutes before sharing with each other.

• Engaging in my first mosh pit at a Denzel Curry concert at Funhouse in South Lake Union, where the lead singer of the opener (a hardcore punk rock band affectionately titled “Trash Talk”) pulled a kid with a nosebleed on stage and yelled, “This is what I’m talking about!!!!!”

• Collectively building worlds with cool strangers at Story Games Seattle. You can always expect nerds to bring magic, both in and out of game (circa March 2018).

  

• Watching my roommate Joe play critically acclaimed video games. Golly, in the fall and winter when it was cold and rainy and harsh in Seattle, nothing would please me more than coming home after work, shoes spongy with rain, and finding Joe reclining and playing Red Dead Redemption 2 and Persona 5 and The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt.

• Performing covers of popular video game tunes with the Seattle Video Game Orchestra and Choir. We even recorded our rendition of “Geralt of Rivia” from The Witcher 3 with a class of University of Washington audio engineers (circa October 2019)!

• Both of my camping trips. In the second one, we sprinted down a mountain, observed an otter (which might have legitimately been a man dressed like an otter to blend in) floating in a pond of water (or oil, you can really never be sure), and listened to Japanese hard rock before sleeping.

It’s not an exhaustive list by any means. Other valuable nuggets of experience are mine and mine alone. I’m sure that over the next few days, emotions about my time in Seattle will slowly rock me back and forth, and I’ll catch myself zoning out and gazing into the distance.

That’s OK, though. For the time being, I’m happy with just looking inward to see what fruits have grown from my past, what seeds I can sow into a very fertile future, and what other garden analogies I can come up with to idealize life :)

Thanks for reading! Make sure to subscribe and leave a comment below!

—Chuckry Vengadam (@churrthing)