Dear Wigleaf,

I am writing from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It's strange: Civil War kitsch, boys in polos, tombstone-style memorials that decorate the open grass. We can't go on a walk without glimpsing the battlefield, without being reminded of death and slavery. I never thought I'd visit let alone live here—Gettysburg, the East Coast. Sometimes I buy chicken from Menonites. I stand lost in the supermarket Googling Lebanon bologna.

I remember never thinking I'd leave Seattle. I remember the breadth of my reality in the greying carpet of my bedroom, VHS tapes from the Greenwood library, the wood beams of the living room ceiling. And then life became bigger: north Seattle, trails in Carkeek Park, the shore at Golden Gardens, Mexifries from Taco Time. And then, as if all of a sudden, I felt urgently the need to ramble.

I also remember feeling Southern California with a longing for when, inevitably, I would have to leave. Maybe it's soaked into the fabric—strip malls that border orange groves, mountains obscured by smog. A century ago, grizzlies fished for salmon in the LA river and you could get just about anywhere by train, even the mountain tops. Maybe then for me Southern California was a kind of longing for what was already gone. These pieces are postcards, too, of times and places in our lives when we were young enough to feel our futures with desperate possibility. What, really, was left for us?

Matt




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Read Matt's stories.

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