Miracle
Issue 7 amalgamation of dark and quirky, geeky and somber. I rode with him on the back of his motorcycle into San Jose one morning, and found peace in the terrifying adrenaline rush that provided me with. Finally, there was bohemian Aaron, who had landed on their couch some months back, and had elected to start paying rent rather than leave. I was introduced to Bioshock and Rockband, and taught how to count to thirty-one on one hand using binary. An unquantifiable amount of alcohol and dice also ushered me into my first game of Dungeons and Dragons. Shortly before I left, I was given Graham’s fedora as a parting gift to remember them by. I have duly cherished that hat. I returned to Palo Alto to see the new friends that had quickly come to feel like old friends, and to revisit those old comrades whose friendship seemed brand new after such an adventure. I trekked up to San Francisco from there. In a van full of dismantled drums, I hitched a ride with a two rock musicians all the way to Portland. Once I was back in my native pacific northwest, my journey became a string of falling action. I tried eel and salmon’s gill at sushi restaurants, attended the grand floral parade, and saw hundreds of breeds of rose during the rose festival. With idle longing for my own bed, I made my way back to Seattle with an amalgamation of melancholy and mellow joy. After two months away from everything familiar, I arrived home‌quickly falling into all the old routines I had abandoned. My grades were solid in all of my classes though, and I still had some money in my pocket from the strangers on street corners who had wanted to buy poetry from my living a statue. I had not aimed to break apart my life, only remove myself from it for a time. In that, I succeeded. I returned full of a new energy. If there is any moral to such a story, any lesson to be gleaned, it has escaped me. There was no guiding principle through any of it, only a raw desire to see and do what I had not done before. Perhaps that is the nature of journeys though. No matter what their purpose or stated mission, they spring forth from a human desire for adventure.
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