Waking up in Seattle an hour ago felt like being home after drifting soullessly through the Midwest, a return to the clarity I had felt living here three summers ago. Except, one thing was unclear. If I had fallen asleep last night in Kalamazoo, then whose eyes was I seeing Seattle through?

 

I didn't need to find a mirror to recognize the body I was now inhabiting. I'd seen it two weeks ago, when I undressed my friend for the first time. I'll spare you the description of my panic and just say that tracing his scars from childhood, running my hands over the rivers of glowing stretch marks, finally, for once, feeling the power of stacking a spine taller than 5' 7'' – it calmed me down.

 

I may have been in an unfamiliar apartment, not to mention body, but I moved to boil water, my mind desperate to retain some normalcy in ritual. I added oats and spicy cinnamon, like my lover did for me when this city was mine, preparing breakfast for this man who disappeared without a trace when he fled from the Midwest the week before. The anger that I felt over the past week, over the cold detachment of one more man, my friend who had spun cotton candy words and held me gently, melted away as I ate: a vulnerable act of care and compassion for myself and through me, him.

 

I considered how I might spend the day with him, see how the city would melt around him as I explored, as him. I left the smartphone with my unanswered calls in his bed and stepped out onto the street. Whatever his intentions, I would feel his presence one more time, showing him the city before letting him go.

 

--

 

Walking through Wallingford in the early fall morning, the mist sets my focus in the near field, making it impossible for my attention to settle anywhere other than the present. I pass children walking to school, carrying their trombones. Like for a child, the present is all-consuming to me, the smallest details significant. The cawing of a crow and the scent of lavender pierce through the chill, and a neighbor's offering of shells in small cups radiates warmth. Forests of rosemary and sage spill onto the sidewalk with an evident aim to soothe and nourish all who pass. What difference is there between loving a person or a stranger's magnolia tree? What does it matter what form I inhabit?

 

My afternoon is spent in the company of other wanderers, Lake Union glinting off my host's sunglasses as the Space Needle lifts, if only briefly, through the fog. The color of my soul is muted, quiet like the orange and brown leaves, no less powerful while in a state of renewal, taking rest.

 

--

 

After a long bus ride through the gloom, I arrive in Ravenna. Walking quickly past the dark houses and quiet cemetery, the tense stride of a woman alone at night giving me away despite my tall form, I spot the church, a warm glow emanating through the windows. Climbing the steps, long legs already burning from the hills and valleys dividing the city, I follow the sound of Duke Ellington, the wailing clarinet from a different time.

 

I dance to be transported, my mind free to focus on the sensation transmitted from my partner's shape through my limbs, nothing else existing in each moment. I have and will again travel thousands of miles to remember what it was like to learn this feeling, when I called Seattle home. I move to jazz to feel what it's like to move outside of time, what it was like to move in a time when music wasn't performative, when it was collaborative: people coming together to build something, electricity transmitted through a crowd, building up and spilling over, ringing through Ella's voice and through my feet.

 

Meeting a stranger's gaze, I'm swept onto the floor, pulled into the gravity of the band.

 

A stillness comes over the room, slowly rippling through the dancers as they step back to form a jam circle, the stage for homecomings and other rites of passage. I enter the ritual circle, the glow of the spotlight on me in the calm before the storm. All eyes on me, completely alone in a sea of strangers, the band begins to play "Bill Bailey." A first stranger enters the circle, spiraling around me before catching me, the band's energy drawing us toward each other. The tension threatening to pull us apart only serves to bring us back together more solidly.

 

As Miss Sophie Turner calls Bill home and I pass by my partner, another one grabs my hand and draws me in, transferring my momentum from one orbit to another. Redirecting my steps – quick, quick, slow, slow – I don't miss a beat.

 

I swivel at the sound of Miss Della Reese's sorrow, my shoulder pulled back into a new embrace, my second partner fading away. As I twist and weave through the band's bars, in alternating tension and compression that pulls my spine upright, the crowd flashes around me.

 

All eyes on me as Miss Pearl Bailey wails for Bill to come home, I know my fellow dancers can see me through the tall form I now inhabit.

 

--

 

Afterward, I sit on the 1 line staring west. Despite the crowd of hockey fans fluttering and chattering around me, the train full and bright with their joy, I can't help but catch glances of his face in the glass, glazed over the huge flowers plastered on the wall outside. These flowers used to ground me as I went home, and they do the same now.

 

If he were here, I know I would be trapped in his orbit, unable to take my eyes off him. Since I'm here instead, my eyes are open to the beauty the city again has to offer me. The complexity of the city's details is more beautiful than one earthly relationship might have been. As I focus in on my familiar surroundings, I drift away from the ghost of my friend.