Powell’s Bookstore, Portland

I am chained to a stainless steel IV pole, staring out the window. A gauntlet lies between me and freedom, spines requiring puncture, white blood cells needing a count, catheters wanting a flush. My hair floats to the ground as I dream of horses. The forest below becomes trunks and limbs made of books as I look down from the hospital window atop Marquam Hill.

Every needle pushes me closer to the edge of liberation, each stab, a promise for the future. I greedily count the dollars as hypodermics slide in and out of my vertebrae, my hands, my chest. One poke, one dollar. One dollar, one step into eternal bliss. All I have to do is bide my time.

Once a week I am released into the world for a few hours. The IV gets disconnected, the shoes put on and the road stretches before me. My mother and I descend on a serpentine road, winding around the hill until we arrive in the heart of the forest.

Powell’s Bookstore rises as an oasis in the midst of Endless Same. It soothes this purgatory of fire and fear, chemo and cancer, with imagination.

The horses are waiting for me between page after page of the Saddle Club book series. I walk the aisle to a room looking out on Burnside with more reverence than I do in church. The bookcases slant ever so slightly inwards as they scale the walls and I press my back against their warm memories. Piles of wood rise around me as I open each cover to check the pencil written price on the first page.

This process requires a strategic approach. If I have x shot dollars in my account and need five books to get me through the remaining hospital days, each book has to average a particular price. Math is magic, transforming commerce and suffering into emancipation.

Powell’s is a portal that fuels life. But if I must die, I want the scent of time-soaked trees to perfume my final breaths. Even when I return to The Hill and am re-inserted with drugs and poison to keep me alive, I am comforted by the rough pulp beneath my hands. The books press against my lap and keep me on the earth where I sleep and dream and heal.