It's all your fault

By now you've realized that I've unfriended you. It was a painful decision, as I knew that I'd never be able to see your reaction when you confusedly scanned your friends list and I was nowhere to be found, and then successfully sought me on our (previously) mutual friends' lists to find that I hadn't, as you originally assumed, left the site for good--I simply left you.

Is it for good? I think so. Remember the bus ride? I do. Remember the dessert buffet and the stray dog? Those were good times, but now are in my past, the door to them painfully closed forever.

Do I hold you personally responsible for the Snoqualmie Batholith? How can you even ask that? I hold you responsible for the entire Cascadia Subduction Zone and all activity within 442 km to the east. Don't act surprised. You knew about the friction those plates were causing, and as I got pushed further down, I eventually lost my ability to store all of that mechanical stress. Couldn't you see it in my eyes, the toll it was taking on me?

Why didn't I bring it up before? That's a good question. I guess I figured you'd just blame it on San Andreas, or Tōhoku, or anything that happened near Prince Rupert. I just don't have the forbearance to stand up to the magnetite you produce, and you produce magnetite like a surf scoter forages for tasty mussels from the ocean shallows.

There was a time when we had the ability to look out the window, run through the grass, and struggle for dominion over a restaurant creamer carafe. We could have stood on the edge of the St. Helens crater, stopped to eat our trail mix at Ape Cave, and then made our way back down the mountain, bruised and bracken-scratched, to wait in line for the restrooms at the Johnston Ridge Observatory. We missed that window, that window that we once had the ability to look out of. And our days of grass and running and trail mix have receded and been compressed into a tiny movie running on a tiny film projector run by a rather tall man who works in a non-union drive-in theater somewhere in Kitsap County.

I have taken to raising pigeons. At first it was for food (these are lean times), but after investing in all of those costly bird leg bands inscribed with my email address and a short e.e. cummings poem, my interest took a different turn. After several months of studying the birds' biological compass(es), I found that their flight patterns and behaviors told an intimate backstory of our friendship: its beginning, quiet middle, and quieter end. I realize now that the pigeons, picking up, storing, and analyzing the high-resolution aeromagnetic data from your activity, were warning me all along. They knew that you controlled faults extending far beyond what I (foolishly) assumed were simply near the surface.

The aftermath of my pigeon observations and the resulting excruciating realizations is my decision to volunteer for a clinical trial involving pigeon brainstem cell transplants. Researchers at Baylor are currently reviewing my application, and I hope to hear from them soon regarding whether or not I qualify for the study. If their hypothesis is correct—that these special cells collect data from the inner ear and store them on a map in the hippocampus—then there is hope that, when you decide to shift the plates again, I will be equipped with a warning system that will tell me what I need to know: where to fly, where to land, and where to rest should the magnetic fields prove to be too strong for a weak human soul to resign to anything but armistice or permanent sleep.