2005-09-05 || 9:59 p.m.

|| welcome to portland. ||

five-hundred hurricane victims are in the process of flying across the country to stay at the abandoned high school behind my apartment building here in portland, oregon. they will be staying here for a few months on the red cots the american red cross dropped off at the cement staircase teenagers used to sulk on and smoke cigarettes twenty years prior.

i heard about it second-hand from the buzz in a coffee shop down the street. they were trying to figure out the repercussions: if 6% of those people come in to the coffee shop, that will be about 25 people a day. walking home we passed the school and there were kids in droves sweeping up dead leaves and weeds from the sidewalk circling the campus; there were news vans and trucks and men were pulling the plywood barricades from the windows.

repercussions. i think the neighborhood will feel different. i almost expect to look out our bedroom window to see black clouds and gale-force winds swirling just above washington monroe high school, the climactic manifestation of heartbreak and confusion and feeling of displacement of all those people.

(what can we do to make you feel better? how can we comfort you when you go to sleep each night in what used to be a high school gymnasium thousands of miles away from anything remotely familiar?)

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