Rain Ear

I arrived in Seattle with ink stains on my hands, as if to say: I have come here to be a software developer, but I am not like the rest of you.

I guess pens do leak, after all. I wanted to stick my blue-blotched hands in someone’s face and tell them that my pen had blown up at cruising altitude, as if this were something unprecedented. Really it wasn’t like that. I had held the pen in one place for too long — poised over 500 yellowing pages of Zadie Smith — and when I looked down again, the traytable and my skin were smeary leopard-print. It was not an explosion; it was more like getting my period.

Out the window, Mt. Rainier — the sort of rock that makes people start religions — looked like it was actually, literally, being supported by clouds. Other, lesser mountains let themselves ooze down to earth like play-doh. Not Rainier. Rainier had its shit together. It had abs like a granite countertop. It had reached the degree in yoga where you concentrate so hard that you levitate.

I was disappointed when the ink washed off so easily in the baggage claim bathroom.

At my hotel, I put the new season of Masterchef on autoplay and curled up in one corner of the cloudy king bed. It was 10 p.m. and the sun was still setting.