Portland, December. It's winter and I'm here alone now. For years it was me and Frankie on the road. Us against the world (like you say when you're in the position to say it). Now it's her and Jude. But it's her and me too. This is what I tell people who ask: "It's complicated." It sounds like a brush-off but it's not. What is it? Complicated.

Frankie and Jude are in California. Or maybe they've gone east. When you're on the road with someone you want to spend time with, destination goes out the window. This is not a bad thing; you're just harder to track. I know how it works—you're out there and it's a big, wild world growing up all around you and the person sitting next to you wants to see it even more than you do. Everything is alive, and because of that you're alive too. You see your future rolling out in front of you. The possibilities endless. Martian rock-scape in Albuquerque. The green and the gold of prairie Nebraska. Wild West New Orleans. You roll unfastened like that and everything else, important or otherwise, slips by the wayside. And let it. The world is bored and half-asleep at work. America's become a stripmall and a sea of blue Walmarts but there's something left for you if you look hard enough. Hunt down that good thing across the landscape. It's okay. It's fine. But it's complicated.

Portland has changed. The house on Franklin Street is vacant. I ride Charlie's ten-speed past it and the lights are on inside and you can see everything in the windows and I think, No, that's my house, I lived there, I lived there three years, no way it's empty, that's where I sleep, that's my driveway my dead car sat in and the redleaf tree hanging over it and those are my blackberry hedges where I stood on a stool to pick berries for pie all summer and that's the step I sit on and read in the morning.

I should say I used to bike past the house on Franklin and I used to think those things. Now I avoid it altogether. Too much history and too many walks down the same streets. Up Franklin to Mount Tabor with Jude and a bag of beer and a paperback shoved in my back pocket. Down Powell to buy wine at Safeway. The Chinese store. Powell Liquor. Devil's Point. Muchas. The Plaid. Too many mornings at the bus stop by KFC, shivering under the gray and drizzle. Too much me and Frances and Jude and Frances. The house is under my skin but it shouldn't be. I know how this works. We moved out on purpose. We gave our notice because we wanted to. We decided to leave Portland. We made a new plan. Why do I feel like the house and I broke up and that it was my fault? There are no answers and now I stay clear. Four more days, I tell myself.

At night I hang out with Ethan. We drive around with the heater blasting and talk about what we're going to do with our lives; how this coming year will be our year since this one was so godawful dark. Ethan's living with a girl he's in love with. They live in a quiet apartment overlooking Belmont, new, clean, lots of books. I go there a lot and when I'm there Ethan and Jana seem happier than anyone I know. I can walk into their apartment wet from the rain and dripping like a stray dog and full of doom and I sit down at their kitchen table and the whole world lightens up a notch.

Jana's pretty and smart, tall, slim, dark hair, well-read. She has a nice laugh, a weightless, surprised, ripple of a laugh. Around Ethan you can see a different kind of light in her eyes. I love them around each other and I love a lot of things just by sitting in their presence. It's healthy, like lying in the sun or walking through a greenhouse or taking a month off booze. Ethan's a good man. I don't say that about a lot of people I know but with Ethan it's true. He was raised on a farm in Nebraska and his values are strong and his intent honest. One of the main things I learned from Ethan was that you should always do exactly what you say you're going to do. Whether drunk or sober, if you say you're going to do a thing, no matter how minor or trivial, you do that thing. Or else you're not a man. You're weak. Or worse: insubstantial. Ethan's judgmental but I like that about him. He's judgmental in a strong, ethical, resolute way. A virtuous way. Ethan holds high standards for himself, and why shouldn't he? Portland is gray and the sidewalks are slick with ice and I find myself walking slower than normal and pulling my parka closed in the front (the zipper is broken). Leaving the house these days you put on two sweaters and two pairs of socks and the biggest coat you can find. If you have a warm hat and gloves you wear them. (I have two pairs of gloves, all four missing a different finger so I wear them all.) It's a lot to take in—the big ashy clouds overhead, some of them gray-black and wisping at the ends, waiting to dump sleet. The dark green pines all around, standing pointed and jagged up at the sky, and a cold wind cutting into the thin parts of your clothes and buses pulling up to the Woodstock and 52nd stop with a hiss of the brakes, and bums in long coats and headphones asking for money or cigarettes. A drunk on the corner tries to fight you. A sign twirler on 39th shaking a white cardboard ad the size of a big novelty check, reading, “Out of Work?! Call Now” (and then the number). It's crowded all day and more so by dusk. Portland City College girls laughing and carrying bookbags and talking about classes, all muffled up in fur and scarfs and legwarmers. Gangs of people my age in ridiculous clothes riding bikes. White trash boys smoking in front of shops in Starter jackets and knit caps.

My last few months here I'm crashing in Charlie and Milla's basement but I spend most of my time alone. In November I woke up with a bad flu one morning after a Dan Deacon show. Was laid up for weeks. The basement with my plywood door latched shut (dark green painted like the rest of the room). Me and the mattress on the floor and a pile of blankets and the hobby desk and the American flag on the wall. When I closed my eyes it was a wild, anxious filmstrip. Battleships covered in moths, spiders gushing out of mouths, pistons pumping, steam gushing. Throughout it all, my head cooking and visions flowering up, stuttering then wilting back down, I thought about Frances. Was she safe? Happy? Was she seeing good places? The thing about Frances Alicio is she's a good one for the road. She sits in the passenger seat with her shoes off and her bare feet on the dash and sings along with the radio and doesn't care what you're doing as long as you move. Frankie doesn't stress when you're on the road and that's the important thing. If you slip up and forget to stop at a service station and run out of gas somewhere stupid she doesn't freak out about it. If there's traffic for miles and you sit for hours on some lonely stretch of interstate she's cool. She looks at you and she smiles and she sings along with the stereo, “so be easy and free when you're drinkin' with me/I'm a man you don't meet every day.”

And you say, “Baby, you're not a man.”

And she sings, “I'm a baby you don't meet every day,” and you do feel free and you do feel easy and you love her so much it makes you stare straight ahead and watch the brakelights in front of you turn on and off like railyard signals switching in the dusk.

Goddammit.
The more you feel the less you react. It's unhealthy. Remember that. Write it down for later.

And so ...

With Frances I feel less alone because I know there's one person out there who has my back and understands me and won't call me out for small inconveniences. With girls before Frances I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. It took a while for me to realize she wasn't concerned with the minor things and sometimes I'd second-guess her until I was tied up in knots. And then I'd step back and remember that this isn't like before, that the person in front of me is someone substantial, someone who would tell me when things aren't working, who wouldn't hide any grudges or worries. She was and is (to a fault) honest. When Frankie and I were on the road she was the navigator. She kept the maps in her bag and charted our course. Frankie's old fashioned for a girl born when she was. She could've used GPS or a phone with internet but what she wanted was to work from the Thomas Guide or the big fold-out paper map, the kind you get at gas stations. She read maps and she learned about frontage roads and how to avoid toll highways when we needed all the money we had for gas and she kept us moving, forward, direct, fast. When you're on the road for a long time the small traditions become important. These things ground you; they give you something to depend on, to look forward to. On the road Frankie's other job was to call out the signs as we passed into each new state. She never missed them but I liked to harass her about it. As we'd near the state sign I'd say, "Do! Your! Job!" and she'd announce, "ARizona" or "NEW Mexico" or "MONtana," always happy to say it, and I was always happy to hear it and to tell her to do her job. "Do your job!" And now what? Me and Portland, four days left, the low ceiling of gloom, frost on the grass in the mornings. At night the sky full of swirling white snow. The mattress, the hobby desk, the American flag. A coat, two sweaters, two socks, a wool hat, gloves. James Jackson Bozic, shuffler, basement caveman, invisible. But "Do your JOB!""OAK-lahoma!" or "NEW Jersey!" “NORTH Dakota!"