My mother is a paranoid schizophrenic who does not want to be found. When I do get information on her whereabouts it's because someone at a shelter or homeless cafe is breaking the rules; a volunteer tells me he's been seeing her around for a year, she went off her meds and was extra cantankerous but now she's back on them. He tells me to return at 6pm but when I stand in the cold and knock on the locked door that evening another worker cracks it and tells me, with a serene face, that she can't give me any information because of confidentiality, nor will she be able to give me any information at any time in the future, nor will I ever be allowed to come inside.
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I know why these rules exist, and I respect them. I respect my mothers' autonomy. She's survived 22 winters homeless in Alaska, she knows how to survive another.
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It's cold in Anchorage right now. The temps have been below zero almost every night that I've been here. I visit a winter homeless camp, where tarps have been piled on top of each other in the shape of a low cabin and empty propane tanks are stacked in the snow. A cheery man in a light jacket tells me he hasn't seen my mother. So many people are homeless in Anchorage, even in the winter. It is beyond hardcore. Every year, many people die. I imagine my mother, who other homeless folks have described as "a frail little lady with white hair who often uses a walker", sleeping outside when it's fifteen below zero. ✨
I tell myself I'm going to find that man who broke the rules for me, and become his friend. Or someone like him. I don't need to have a relationship with my mother, if she doesn't want that. I know how bad she feels when she has to interact with people, and I don't want to make her feel worse. But I don't want her to die in a snowbank, either. I'm going to find someone who knows her, who sees her on the reg, and through that person, find a way to help her. I stuff my hands in my pockets and shuffle down the snowy sidewalk. I can feel my eyelashes freezing. I imagine my mother off her meds, hurling verbal abuse at the people serving her dinner, and chuckle to myself.
As an adult coming back to Alaska in the summers I never wanted to spend much time in Anchorage; I hardly knew anyone here, there were ghosts everywhere, the city made me too sad. I thought this winter trip wld feel like that- lonely, isolating, haunted. ✨
But by some trick of serendipity I ended up in a house of rly good ppl whose long histories are, amazingly, intertwined with mine (all of us being west coast punks of a certain age) and instead of feeling alone I'm being reminded that actually, I've been connecting w ppl/cultivating relationships w ppl my whole life, weaving my history with others year by year, and my aloneness is an illusion that I create but don't want to anymore- I want to tear it down like cobwebs, and keep tearing it down when it grows back.
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I thought I wld feel extra super alone on this trip but instead the ppl here feel like home, they are the kindest, most interesting smart and generous ppl, and the fact that this is happening in the place that is also my hometown is almost too much, like it makes me mad at the universe. We spin our wheels and we spin our wheels and we never get anywhere, but we end up where we're meant to be all the same, right?
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I dunno, I'm starting to believe that home is a real thing, maybe the most pedestrian thing, unglamorous, easy to overlook but waiting, brilliant, covered in hoar frost
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📍This is Dana'ina land
I'm in Alaska right now. I'm here partly to continue looking for my mom (she's been homeless in Anchorage for 23 years) and partly because, since I left at age 14, I have only been back to Alaska in the summers, and my relationship to place here is one of the things that allowed me to survive my childhood.
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Growing up, this land was my primary caregiver; the boreal forest nurtured me, reassured me, placed me relationally when otherwise I would have belonged to no-one, and tethered me to my body and to the earth. ✨
For years I have longed to not only find my mother and make sure she's safe (and in this way give myself the only real closure that exists- the closure we give ourselves) but to rebuild my relationship with winter here so that I can know this land again as its whole self, and to continue to grow that relationship because the older I get, the more clearly I feel in my body that this is one of the most important and nurturing relationships we ever get a chance to have.
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So, I'm having an enchanted time in this magic winter place, and connecting with friends here, and I'm going to venture out into it and feel myself held in cold space, in the snow, and walk in the sunrise that lasts for hours and sparkles the hoar frost on the trees
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And find my mother in all of it, too
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And I'm glad to be here and it feels very right
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And I was going to bring my dogs but I'm glad I didnt bc they wldve HATED it 😅 (They're bein taken care of in warm Tucson 🌞)
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📍This is Dana'ina land
I can't sum up a year or a decade, linear time maybe isn't real? Anyway I don't know how to hammer my life that flat. All I know is that each year I grow more bewildered and unsure about absolutely everything, and after I get over the embarrasment of having ever thought I knew anything in the first place it's actually sort of freeing- and then the next year it happens again- more things I thought I knew falling away, more embarrasment, more freedom. I imagine the cycle will continue for the rest of my life. I bring this quote up kind of on the reg if u read a lot of my stuff so forgive me for rehashing but I have always loved what Keats said:
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"I am certain of nothing but the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination"
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That sentiment is the only thing I've found that I can really hang a hat on.
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Cycles around the sun aside, I hope yall had a gay holiday season or at least a tolerable one and I hope we're all more or less ok in 2020 ✨
