This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Revelation. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
Years ago I stopped referring to Salt Lake City as home. Queer people have often made recourse to a “chosen family” when their families of origin rejected them; I’m grateful that my family has always just been my family (with a lot of chosen add-ons), but home did become a matter of choice—gradually, by trial and error, culminating with the pandemic. In the blinding confusion of early lockdown, I contemplated flying, if not “home,” then to be with my parents and siblings and nephew in Utah; but I looked around my apartment at 35 plants whose corpses I’d have to return to, and two cats who seize and cry with terror if they go beyond the staircase landing, and that was all the thinking there was to do.
The experiences that followed made me a New Yorker, not in the ways people usually talk about (like length of residency or method of eating pizza or whatever), but in my concept of self. For, actually, the first time ever, my geography felt essential, determinative: I was who I was, in part, because of where I lived—or I lived where I lived because of who I was. The connection was causal either way, and I suppose what it centered on was undissuadability. Many of the people I personally happened to know who had the resources to go elsewhere in that time but didn’t were LGBTQ+. Nobody comes to New York and then stays without a surplus of determination, and these days, thank goodness, most of the New Yorkers are home. But I do think that for some of us the choice of home we’d made carried a significance that was only heightened by crisis.
Still, in my little zone of experience there was more lightness in that summer of the undissuadable than you might expect. Here we were, survivors—and not a first-time survivor in the bunch—in a city that sometimes felt like it was all ours, a place both subdued and aberrantly free.
Stating the obvious, undissuadability is useful to a first-time novelist; and to even a second-time triathlete, which I will be next weekend. Today I’m in Salt Lake City, far from home, and in a few days I will be in Los Angeles, which, because at least I lived there in the agency of adulthood, is actually less far. This was another summer when I didn’t leave home much, by design: Home is where the creative body finds its rhythms, and finds them again the next day.
But leaving home has its uses, too: Away from home is where the training culminates in the race. Away from home is where the mountain offers up its revelations. Away from home might be where that chosen, original family cradles its reminders of who we were before we became who we are—reminders of how we are evolving, reminders of the past self to whom the future self is always calling.
And home has its outposts, unmarked and a little chimeric—soil reserved in the farthest lands where our feet fall surprisedly sovereign. California is no longer my home, but it contains a few of these. I found one last year, though it was in the water: about ten minutes into the triathlon swim off the Malibu shore, when my panic abated and I found breath again and all I could see in any direction was color. It was familiar to me as if remembered, a memory of home crafted not in the past but year upon year into the future; the memory of an old man, at home in the sea. Maybe it is the gift he and I are making, a message, for a younger, newer athlete, his femur in pieces just down the road: “Don’t stop. You’re on the way home.”
Coming Tuesday: Swimming.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.