Places

Portland, Maine is the winter he turns twenty- three.

He drives up in November with the cats in the carrier, three boxes in the back seat, the duffel bag, and the box of notebooks, which he carries himself up the stairs of the sublet and places in the closet before he does anything else. He unpacks in the order he always unpacks: notebooks, then books, then everything else. The desk goes by the window overlooking a street of old brick buildings and bare trees.

He sits down.

He writes: He is gathering distance. Distance is a tool.

Portland is cold in a way Springfield is not — not just temperature, the specific cold of a northern coastal city, the kind that comes off the water and makes the air feel clarified, like it has been cleaned. He has not been cold like this in years. He finds he does not mind it. The cold is

honest. The cold does not pretend to be something it is not.

He walks the city obsessively, the way he always walks a new city — every street, every neighborhood, until the map is internalized and the street names become reflexive rather than deliberate. He walks to the waterfront and stands looking at the harbor and thinks about containment, about what it means to be surrounded by water, about the way certain physical environments create a feeling of being held that certain cities have and others don’t.

Portland holds him differently than Springfield does. Springfield holds him with its familiarity, its echo of Holyoke, its specific grit that he knows in his body. Portland holds him with its unfamiliarity, its willingness to be a place where he has no history, where no one on the street connects him to anything that happened before this November.

He is nobody here.

This is exactly what he needed.

* * *

He writes six poems in Portland that will be the best things in An Inconvenient Attachment.

He writes them fast, in the way good things come when the conditions are finally right — not because inspiration arrived but because he has cleared enough space that the work that was waiting can finally move. He had been crowded. Too much context, too much history, too much of Holyoke pressing against everything he made. Portland gave him room.

He writes in the mornings at the desk by the window. He writes in the afternoons in a coffee shop three blocks away that has a back corner with a small table and an outlet and a staff that leaves him alone once they have understood that he is a person who wants coffee and quiet in that order and nothing else. He writes in the evenings sometimes, late, when the city is its quietest and the fan he brought from Springfield is going and Ghost is on the radiator and Omen is doing his shelf thing and the street outside is empty and dark and the window reflects his own face back at him and he writes through that too.

He is alone for three months in a real way. Not lonely — alone. There is a distinction he has written about before and is living now: loneliness is the absence of connection, which is painful. Aloneness is the presence of yourself, which can be spacious if you have learned to be

good company for yourself, which he has been working on and which Portland is, it turns out, excellent for practicing.

* * *

East Longmeadow is a mistake he does not regret.

The mistake is in thinking that quiet equals peace, that the suburb will give him something the city hasn’t. It gives him different problems. He writes poorly in East Longmeadow — not nothing, never nothing, but flatter. The prose loses its texture. The poems lose their edge. He is surrounded by people whose lives are organized around things he has no framework for and he finds himself spending energy on the performance of normalcy that he would rather spend on the work.

He stays eight months.

He moves back to Springfield on a Wednesday in March. He calls the landlord on State Street, gets the same apartment — same two flights of stairs, same window with the view of the street, same dark-gray paint on the walls that he chose for reasons he is still right about. He carries the notebooks up the stairs first. He puts the desk in front of the window.

He makes coffee.

He sits down.

He writes: Springfield does not pretend. The streets do not dress up for company. He has always understood that language.

He is home.

* * *

He has lived in four places since leaving Holyoke. He has driven to a fifth city, Portland, and driven back. Each place has left something in him that is not just memory but material — the specific light and sound and smell of each city, the particular way each one organized the world around him, what each one taught him about how he works and what he needs.

Springfield taught him endurance. Portland taught him silence, the productive kind. East Longmeadow taught him what he doesn’t need, which is equally valuable information. Holyoke taught him everything foundational — how to read a room, how to carry a thing, how to build something from insufficient materials.

He is twenty-six. He has not stopped moving. He is also, for the first time in years, genuinely settled. The apartment on State Street is not temporary. The desk by the window is not

temporary. The box of notebooks in the closet is getting heavier every month.

He intends to keep filling it.

* * *

He is good at being alone. He wants to distinguish this from being lonely.

Loneliness is the pain of unwanted aloneness. What he has — what he has built, cultivated, practiced over eleven years of notebooks and desks and early mornings — is a comfort with his own company that is the opposite of loneliness. He is good company for himself. He knows how he works. He knows what he needs. He knows the signs when the aloneness is tipping toward something less healthy and he knows the practices that correct the tipping before it becomes a problem.

The walks. The reading. The cats. The occasional visit to the coffee shop on Main Street. The phone calls to his parents that he is trying to make more frequent.

He is not a hermit. He is a person who has learned that his best work happens in solitude and who has structured his life to protect the solitude without being imprisoned by it. This is a

balance he has been working on for years. He is not perfect at it. He is better at it than he was.

He writes: He finds himself showing up differently now — less armor, more attention. Because of what it feels like to be seen by someone who actually stays. He is learning to be that person for himself.

He reads it back.

He keeps it.

* * *

October 31st is the day he starts the forty-fourth notebook.

He finishes the forty-third at 9 PM on Halloween — the last line of the last page, which he has not planned and which arrives as the last lines always arrive, by the notebook being full and the next sentence going on a new page that does not exist.

He closes the forty-third. He dates the spine: Oct 2023. He puts it in the box.

He takes the new notebook from the pack. He opens it. He writes the date at the top of the first page.

He writes: This is notebook forty-four. He has been writing for eleven years. He is twenty- six years old and he is at the desk on State

Street in Springfield and the city is outside the window doing its Halloween thing and the cats are somewhere and the coffee is cooling and everything he needs is here.

He reads it back.

He adds: He is still here. The notebooks are still here. The work is still here. None of it has stopped. None of it will stop.

He closes the notebook.

He goes to the window.

Outside: children in costumes, adults carrying flashlights. The corner store lit from inside. The woman who walks her dog at the same time every night, not looking up from her phone, adjusted version — tonight the dog is wearing a small cape.

He watches for a few minutes.

He goes back to the desk.

He opens the forty-fourth notebook.

The line arrives.

He has always written the next line.

He always will.He thinks about what it means to be a writer who publishes.

Not what it means aesthetically or philosophically — he has thought about that extensively and has arrived at positions he holds and will defend. This is the practical meaning.

Time is the real cost. Publishing pulls hours from writing. He has accepted this. Imperfectly. He would rather be at the desk. He is always rather-be-at-the-desk. But the work requires more than writing. He does what the work requires.

He lifts the pen.

He keeps at it.

He looks at the page.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment that happens in the space between one section and the next. He is not editing. Not yet. He is reading. Asking: does this hold? Does it carry what it is supposed to carry? He reads the last paragraph again. The light has shifted. The afternoon is almost gone. His back is tight. He has been sitting too long. He gets up. Stretches. Sits back down. Ghost watches from the couch with one eye. Vincent looks at the notebook. The operating principle: the work outlives the moment that required it. The language is what remains. He keeps at it. He is making things that will

outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

He takes up the pen again.

The next line comes.

He writes. He always writes.