Your heart pumps blood.

It’s 11:30 PM, September 8th, 2018, a Saturday, and you just finished your dish-washing shift at the P5 Center for the Arts. You take the elevator up, out of the stuffy concrete basement, and step out into the cool night of downtown Portland where the soft breeze dries the sweat from your sticky skin. The towering lights of Broadway greet you, the night life energizing your tired limbs, and filling you with the rare joy of simply being alive.

You float on this feeling, passing a restaurant full of financiers in button down shirts sipping their high-priced cocktails. From your coat pocket you pull out and unwrap one of your chef’s oatmeal bars made especially for the crew. It’s a small gesture of kindness far removed from the Troutdale farm you used to work at where they would yell at you so often, for no reason at all, and this fills you with a righteous gladness that feels so fierce it borders on vengeful. If they could see you now they’d hardly recognize you, so happy, so strangely confident, and taller, probably, because we’re all pretty small when we’re crawling around picking green beans. They tried to keep you down. Humbled you into the dirt.

You also kept yourself down, but there were friends, ready to offer a hand, who wouldn’t let you stay there, and your chef is undoubtedly one of those kinds of people. A part of the chain to pull you out of the muck, and then, lift you to a height beyond skyscrapers.

A block later, you manage to catch the Yellow line train, saving yourself a half hour wait, and punctuating another perfect shift. Elated, you take your seat, and watch the bar hoppers and 20-something year old kids wander the chaotic streets of Burnside. There is no envy here, you’ve had that life, and it gave you nothing. Instead, you are filled with a deep satisfaction as you recall the day’s events, the sometimes corny but always funny jokes, that lovely smile like sunshine on your face, and, of course, the food. Food made with love. You’ve never eaten so well. You’ll recall these moments and more during the ride home, loop them in your head, over and over, until they are woven into your cortex. You hope to never forget this. You hope.

Then you recall your chef deftly cutting vegetables, laughing with the cooks, a fleeting smile, a simple joke, a furrowed brow, a kind hello, an encouraging phrase, anything, really, to get you spinning, and your thoughts start to lift off, higher and higher, into fanciful hoping, where you begin to wish for an impossible life, a partner to the Sun, and it is then you remember how miserable you can feel, wrapped up in delusional fantasy.

The words to tell her aren’t there yet, and won’t be for another ten months, but you don’t know that, only the pain of the present, the toss and turn of longing. Every dawn, the heartache renewed. How much pain you’d be spared if you only knew that you’d get to a place of perfect equilibrium free of any uncertainty, five unbelievable years later, not through words, but your drawing, in a frame, and finally seeing this, understand that, in the end, you got more than you ever hoped for.