March 15th we decided to leave.

Matt’s lease ended June 1st, which gave us two and a half months to tie up loose ends and get the hell out of dodge. There wasn’t a lot of thought behind it. Our guts said go, and we listened.

Because really, imagine lying on your deathbed, skin on your face wrinkled like an old man’s nutsack on a cold day, clinging to the mystery of what your life could have looked like. Unable to step fully into death because you never fully stepped into life.

Talk about a nightmare.

All we really knew was that we loved each other and that somewhere, somehow, some way, we wanted to open a bed and breakfast.

And the reason we were doing it? Simple.

What we were doing, felt right.

That’s it.

But before we could leave, we had to say goodbye to Portland, the city of roses, where beauty and decay share a smoke on the curb. A damp quilt of punks, burnouts, baristas, anarchists, misfits, and the chronically misunderstood floating down a river of stale Rainier.

A city where misgendering and micro-dosing cross paths under moody skies and ever-watching crows. Portland is half-feral and half-lazy as shit, stitched together with moss, fentanyl and the smelly sting of piss-soaked walls.

Portland, a moist stain in the Willamette Valley’s crotch, she either rots or ferments, depending on who your talking to.

The sidewalks are covered in leaves and human turd, urban landmines marking the city’s slow collision between radical compassion and systemic failure.

A surreal, dreamlike place that taught me more than a few lessons and offered a mirror I wasn’t always ready to look into. Something I dig deeper in: An Ode to Portland.

It’s the kind of city where, on your birthday, you can eat and drink your way through the day for free, if you know where to look and where leaving anything in your car overnight means waking to find a shattered window.

A city so brazen in “fuck it” energy, in 2022 some guys opened the “Shroom House” an illegal but legal psilocybin dispensary on Burnside. No secret menu, no hushed exchanges, just psychedelic mushrooms in the display case as if it was a bakery. Despite it being illegal, it still managed to last just a few days before the authorities stepped in, but for that brief moment, it felt like the most Portland thing ever: part rebellion, part hallucination, all-in on chaos and hope.

That’s the place we were leaving.

There were just a handful of things left to do before we hit the road...