The Loneliness of Uncertainty

I’m sitting on a post of a guardrail, at the edge of a bluff that overlooks the Puget Sound. Looking westward across the sound, I can see the Olympic Mountains. They’re covered by a thin veil of mist, and I’m almost wondering if they’re really there. They seem unreal...like most of today.

I’m in Seattle. I arrived here last night, and I’ve spend the day wandering along the Lake Union canal toward the Puget Sound. My walk is at once peaceful and serene…but also disturbing. The disturbing part comes not from the scenery, but from my mind’s reaction to this experience. I don’t quite understand it. But like I said, it almost feels unreal.

This morning I came to the Gas Works Park in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. The area used to be a plant that manufactured gas from coal, and it has now been turned into a public park. The park sits on the north end of the most lake-like part of Lake Union, directly opposite downtown Seattle. Sitting atop the parks’ prominent hill offers a fantastic view of the city’s skyline. The scene was beautiful and tranquil – overall a pretty normal experience thus far.

Departing the park, I went for a walk in quest of the stone troll that supposedly sits under some bridge in Fremont. I started to walk along Lake Union toward the Sound. As I walked, I fell into sort of a deep meditation. I was awake and experiencing the world, but I was also removed from it. Rather than simply being present, and experiencing the moment, it was like ever sight, every sound, every smell evoked some vivid memory into which my consciousness fell. I would see the boats and suddenly be back on Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. I would smell the salt air, and be catching a Frisbee with my Dad at the Jersey shore. I would see the greenery of the northwest – the evergreens and ivy – and be traipsing again through the woods of New Jersey with my childhood friend Max, who’s now moved back to Switzerland. I was at once enjoying the beauty of my walk along the canal – the foliage on my left and the Seattle architecture of the industries on my right – and also not existing in the present; my consciousness was housed more in memory.

As I was experiencing all these memories, I was also experiencing false memories – memories of things I’d dreamt, but not actually experienced. A field in the back of Jake Krueger’s house – whose father my dad used to do carpentry for – with a horse that had run away, and we were chasing it through the woods. A playground near the baseball field in Roseland that doesn’t actually exist, off of which I would throw myself either to induce a state of flying or to end the dream in the darkness of a fatal fall. I’ve had many dreams like this; they’re not connected by any theme – they just have a very similar feeling. There are certain sensations I have, certain experiences that I always associate with these dreams. And when I experience those sensations in life, those dreams are evoked as if they were memories I’d actually experienced. There are even times when it takes me a few minutes to realize the memory is of a dream.

As I walked along the canal, experiencing these memories, I didn’t smile when thinking fondly of my parents, or remember the excitement when Max and I found an abandoned fort in the woods. Rather, the memories came back to me as pictures of loneliness. Not that I had been lonely in any of those times or that I was lonely now in remembering better times, but almost as if the memories had been modified – like an old home video where the tape is worn out and the sound doesn’t work anymore. You watch pictures of familiar faces, some of whom have now departed this world, people you want so badly to reach out to and hug and hold and talk to and hear their voices. But try as you might, in the end you know you can’t – they just move on silently, mouthing inaudible words to each other while ignoring you – because the tape has faded. It’s like looking at a place you want to be from behind soundproof glass, or watching a scene that was once filled with people and laughter and life, and now there’s just the scene… no people, and no laughter. Just a field, or an empty house, or a vacant window.

And yet, although the memories are modified, they are still memories that I’m experiencing as sort of a reflection upon my life. I withdraw from the world into these memories, seeking shelter within them. I occupy my mind by reflecting upon anything and everything…anything but the fact that I’m now without a job. I'm trying to keep from slipping into the terrible void that follows the end of a dream in which you felt like you had direction, that you knew what you wanted to do and could have actually made a difference. I’m now without vision, without work. Just wandering the streets, half here, half not…half in the past, half in a past that never even happened.

The people I’m remembering, the ones that still exist, seem so far away, so detached from my memories of them. It’s like I want to sit back in those memories again, go back to the festival on the shore of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. Sit in that picture and talk to the people as they were then, not as they are now – alcoholic, or in jail, or dying. The people in those memories were part of my life, and they people that they’ve become are not. Who they are now is utterly alien to who I’ve become, and trying to reconnect would just be futile.

I pause my meditation to look back out along the Sound. A man, standing on what looks to be a kind of kayak, or a paddle board – flat like a surf board, single paddle, alternating sides with his graceful stroke like a Japanese gondola – coasts his way half a mile from shore, stopping every now and to inspect the red buoys that bob up and down with unknown purpose. He looks at peace, but I’m projecting my loneliness onto him, as his is the only vessel within eyesight. Not the loneliness of wanting company, but the loneliness of uncertainty, now that I’ve been violently jarred off course in one fell swoop. Is the paddleboard man actually out there on the Sound, or is it just my mind creating a visual image of what I’m feeling, as if in an effort to explain it to me? In the past I’ve made a mockery of such questions, but now I’m really not sure. I just don’t feel very sure about anything, right now.