On a rainy afternoon when you are standing in your galley kitchen with your new roommates, coworkers and friends (three in one), you can take the time to chat about pleasantries, or go over the perfunctory story of how you got to Alaska, or you can skip right to the good stuff. Skipping right to the good stuff only requires two things: faith and an open mind.

Faith that your friends will understand where you are coming from when you dive right in, and that they will be willing to share, and an open mind for any variety of response.

So: if ye have faith, if ye have an open mind, if ye have a galley kitchen: you ask the question: What is in your Love Museum?

We all have a love museum. You may not realize it but you have walked it in your dreams and gotten stuck in certain displays, exhibits. Other areas may have dust and of course there are sections that are there but you haven’t acknowledged them yet.

So I just visualized a “Love Museum” to describe our love history because we come to expect what we’ve already experienced out of love, or some variation of.

Our parents, or lack thereof, are usually the exhibits at the front. They make the strongest impression in our path to love, no?

At least that’s what my therapist says and I happen to agree.

Anyway, I was surprised by my own discoveries as I gave an oral tour through my own museum.

Of course there was the facebook version: and then I was in a relationship with X, then It Was Complicated with Y, and then it was heartbreak after Z. Mostly the heartbreak is what I remember because I move through breakups about as quickly as a black slug: is it moving? Oh I think it is. No wait, it’s dead. Nope, moving, moving ever so slightly to the left. That old broken heart as a slug routine.

There was the Gilmore Girls flavor: how you felt with each person, how hard it was to let them go, how you still hold on/don’t hold on to them now.

Though the love museum is “supposed to be” (I love how I say “supposed to be” when I invented the darn thing) about romantic love,

I kept coming back to my family: how leaving their nurturance and support, in a way, is still the hardest and biggest heartbreak of them all. But also, how deeply their opinions of how my love life should look affect me. I don’t want to disappoint them, shame them, or date the wrong guy.

I teared up as I described how my family operates: It’s no one’s fault, really, but it is what it is and there’s no changing that. It’s a part of growing up: perhaps if my parents had loved me a little less, or wanted me around a little less, it would have been easier to leave and do my own thing. I keep going back to that desire for home and have found that time and time again I nested one out inside of my parents’ wings because it was the closest to home as I’d ever been: the one they provided for me. It’s imperfect as all homes are. But it was the one of my childhood and it was joyful and kind and deep and beautiful. It was more than most childhood homes can hope to be. I don’t say that boastfully but out of long-sought gratitude and perspective. I say it as I loosen grip of the sadness that I feel when I think of my childhood, too.

Now, I’m 30 (just turned), and my childhood is literally that. It’s a Thing Of The Past. It’s the distant cloud you remember in the background of your life’s portrait. It’s central, semanal, but it’s faint in the distance. So many memories have been stacked between it and current soil.

And speaking of that, The River of Life was an activity Claire suggested. Apparently: you zero in on an event in your life (e.g. Moving to Alaska). Then you pinpoint the contributing events that led you to the event du jour: Alaska.

I’ll do it:

Alaska > > Dinner with Cari in Istanbul > > Traveled Europe (in 2 parts) > > Executive Assistant (2.5 years) > > Needed health insurance (when I turned 26)> > Floundered about (exploring whilst depressed for about 4 years)> > Theatre Degree (a gift from my parents)> > High school (Small school, auditioned for the play) > > Moved to Atlanta > > Middle school play (General Valley Hospital- A Soap Opera Spoof) > > A Flair for the Dramatic > > I was born.

Ketchikan River of Life (from present to past!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now I’m here. Now I’m 30. I decide what stays and what goes. I decide what to bring with me. I’m glad about that because there’s no more time to waste.

I write this all to say that it may just be a most fascinating process to explore your own history of loves as if they were statues in a museum. What would they look like and how do they affect you now? Are they prominently featured at the entrance?

Now I live on this strange island. I don’t have access to the outside world in the same ways- no car, little privacy to have a phone call without being confident it won’t be heard. In a way, all I have is what I’ve brought with me to this place.

 

Speaking of the River of Life, I’ve come to learn a tremendous amount about Salmon while I’ve been in Ketchikan.

Tremendous is actually not at all correct. But I have learned a dollop of details and I’m fascinated with the creatures.

Salmon always go back to the streams they were born in to spawn, and then they die.

It’s unreal that fish, who we don’t give much credit to for their sophistication, follow such a deeply beautiful practice of returning to their “life-bed of water” as their spawning place, and eventual death place. 

“For the five species of Pacific salmon (Chinook, chum, coho, pink, and sockeye), this arduous journey is a race against the clock that ends in a fleeting romance and ultimately death.” (baynature.org) To read more about why salmon die after they spawn, click here.

Talk about a river of life!

We have a salmon ladder in Ketchikan. We know that there are certain creeks that contain the old (dead) salmon in July and August, and you can see where the young salmon start out at the base of the “ladder.”

I hope now perhaps more than ever before in my search for purpose and love, that I find purpose enough to have a stream to fight against to make peace with my birthplace, and ultimately to leave this life with some sort of legacy.

And all this beautiful searching, acknowledging, experience and realization is part and parcel of the swim upstream, be it arduous, be it strengthening, be it steep: and aren’t we all just fishes in the sea, fighting for our rights and looking for our spot and passing on what we know at the end?