the greatest plague is the futile escapism we engage in every day

the greatest plague is the futile escapism we engage in every day.

when my wife and I separated,

six months before the divorce,

the only place I could find fast that I could afford

was a room in a kind of boardinghouse

for sad men in various stages of disconnection from the world.

there was the computer programmer

who spent most of his time in his room upstairs.

there was a guy who would walk along those streets with no sidewalks

to his job at home depot a mile away.

there was the guy who lived in the basement and used a separate entrance,

whom I only ever met once.

there was the 70-something guy in the room next to mine,

who woke me up one night, asking for help,

because he’d locked himself out of his bedroom when he’d gone to the bathroom.

he didn’t have a cellphone and wanted to use mine to call the landlord,

but, as I pointed out, the landlord jason lived hours away, in eastern washington.

(jason himself was a housemate too periodically:

randomly, as I lay in bed, I’d hear the crunch of gravel

and see his pickup’s headlights

funnel under my blinds and pour across the undecorated walls of my room,

then I’d hear him cook a late dinner down the hall,

before stomping upstairs to sleep in a room he kept for himself,

for when he had work meetings in western washington

for his construction company,

a room that he might have had since he was a boy,

since this place with unfamiliar faces hanging framed in common areas

was his childhood home).

I gave the old guy, lee, a blanket of mine

and he slept in the armchair in the living room,

which normally none of us hung out in.

the next morning, even before I usually got up,

I heard another one of the men there being sick in the bathroom

on the other side of my bedroom wall.

it was the only bathroom the four or sometimes five of us shared.

I got dressed and left to find somewhere to relieve myself.

later I learned the home depot guy took the computer programmer to the hospital,

in somebody’s car, to be treated for kidney stones,

proving a kind of community can be cobbled together by happenstance.

that reassuring humanist aspect to this household on lincoln avenue, though,

was but a pale compensation for the dark sadness I felt while living there.

I never once brought my kids over; in fact, for the two months I lived there,

they only saw it twice: when they and their mom helped me move in

and when they all helped me move to somewhere slightly better.

I was still watching my kids after school in the family home I’d moved out of.

when my soon-to-be ex-wife came home from work, I’d leave but not go back to that boardinghouse right away,

because it depressed me so much to be there in the daylight,

when I felt the exposure of my new life most keenly.

instead, I’d drive to a park and read relationship books,

or I’d sit in my car in the olympia regional learning academy parking lot,

one block up from lincoln,

and talk with a friend or family member on the phone,

or I’d just cry and cry — something I didn’t even feel I had enough privacy

to do in my room at the place down the road.

that house was literally on a dead-end block,

and that’s how I felt about my life then.

I vowed that when I found some place better to live,

I would never again drive down boulevard, the arterial road that led to lincoln.

then, just before I moved to a place on the westside —

where I would also only live for a couple months, but at least

with my kids half the week —

I got a second part-time job,

which paired with the sporadic work I got called in for

at the children’s museum, still didn’t equal

the income of a living wage full-time job.

yet I was grateful to have gotten called in for an interview

and then offered a position anywhere, after all the rejections

to job applications I’d received.

it was just a minimum wage position as a delivery driver for a florist,

but the work had surprising benefits, such as long stretches driving alone

on rural roads with little traffic, where I could think in peace

and even bawl my eyes out, with no one seeing me, to incrementally

achieve some kind of catharsis for what I was going through.

the worst part of that job, though, was something completely unexpected

and unchangeable, because it was out of my control.

the flower deliveries were assigned to drivers based on a map of the county

divided up into several large chunks,

and I was given the eastern section, which included st. peter’s hospital

and all the retirement homes around it.

that meant that to get there from the florist in south olympia,

I had to zigzag on residential backroads until I got to the arterial called boulevard,

from which I quickly got to pacific and then lilly, the street with the hospital,

where, in addition to room deliveries, I was in charge of

adding new vase arrangements to the coolers in the gift shop in the lobby.

since first I’d go assess that gift shop’s needs, calling back to my coworkers at the florist

to describe staple bouquets that had sold out,

I actually drove back and forth on that route several times during each six hour shift.

that meant that multiple times a day, while on boulevard, I drove past

that dead-end block of lincoln, where I had briefly lived in a house with other sad men.

in a seeming rebuke to my vow to never pass that way again,

the fates locked me into that job and that route for the next year and a half it took

to get better work elsewhere,

as if it were necessary to hold my gaze by force

upon that which I didn’t want to see and thought I could easily escape.

if escape is how you frame things, though, you’ll never feel release.

it turned out my respite from driving down boulevard and past lincoln avenue was brief

in the grand scheme of things.

several months after beginning a new full-time job

close to my home on the edge of downtown — the third place I moved to

after leaving the family house —

I began dating someone who lived in the south east corner of the county,

and going down boulevard was one of the few routes to get to her house.

then, this year, several months after that girlfriend, kirsten, moved into

the place I am now — the fourth home I’ve had since getting separated —

my ex-wife moved out of the house we’d shared for 10 of our 18 years together

and into one on a road off of boulevard,

a half mile or so south of lincoln.

So now, twice a week, when I pick up or drop off my kids,

I once again pass the turnoff to get to that boardinghouse;

in fact, if I turn my head and look toward the end of that block,

I’d probably be able to glimpse its familiar, nondescript facade.

but I won’t: because what destiny’s been trying to show me over and over

can’t be seen with the naked eye anyway.

that is because it is the myth of the always possible explanation.

it is not always possible to know why certain coincidences keep occurring.

it is not always possible to know why relationships fall apart.

it is not always possible to know why life’s challenges wax and wane.

it is not always possible to know why we can’t all get on board

with what it takes to stop a plague.

the compulsion to run away from this unsettling state of unknowing

into the ever-elusive arms of a hoped-for truth

can wear us down and distract us from our lives at hand

worse than any illness with or without a cure.

turn now back to where we last were,

before I set us up to learn anything — from this poem of mine,

from my life, or from your own.