Damn I'm gonna miss portland. I realized this today.
It is the dumbest city. Like, if you could take the concept of a peter pan complex and then express it as a city, that city would be portland.
But at the same time, it's exactly the city to be in if you have no CLUE what the fuck you are doing. Every neighborhood is a new chance to be someone else. I literally have costumes for different areas of town that I keep on hold, in case of wine tastings or house parties or food-cart openings (of which I've been to 3 IN THREE MONTHS). Black skinny jeans as a base, then vary accessories depending on the location. All black on Alberta, feathers and pendleton print and shit on Hawthorne, platforms and minimalist tunic in the Pearl, kool hiking gear anywhere east of Hollywood. I feel like a complete poseur and fraud everywhere I go, but in the most fun way possible. I want to yell I NORMALLY JUST WEAR BOOTCUT JEANS STILL and see how many people laugh, thinking I'm being ironic. I want to ask, are bootcut jeans old enough for me to wear ironically yet? But then I realize that if you have to ask, they probably arent.
The way I'm writing this makes it sound like mocking. It's not. It's fun and wistful, because I know that this time in my life is almost over. Not because of some self-enforced age limit or societal declaration, but just...because. I can feel it. I'm starting to get over it, the way you get over Power Rangers or Tiger Beat magazine or clubs. I noticed it most acutely over Memorial Day weekend, when I met up with my some of my dearest and most hard-drinking study abroad friends. We still put away an abnormal amount of alcohol, but there were no kegstands, no broken furniture. In the morning we all took vitamins. In the afternoon we went to the gym. I'm starting to settle, in the best possible way.
And I know that all my life I'll have friends who DON'T grow out of this phase--friends back home, friends I leave here. For that I am grateful, because I'll always have a way to revisit this time in my life. But for me personally it's almost over. It feels like the right kind of destiny.
