Hello everyone! Thanks for choosing my story. As you can see, this is the third entry in Will and Tomoko's story, and although you'll be able to follow the story just fine without reading the others, if you're interested in the characters or you want more context for their relationship, you might enjoy reading the stories in order.
As always, any feedback is VERY welcome. Help my next piece be even sexier! Enjoy!
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The temperate rainforest of North America is, with the right kind of eyes, a forest of high drama. Stretching from approximately Central Oregon at the southern edge to Juneau, Alaska on the northern edge, the woods here have an ancient, primeval feeling. Hidden below the almost painfully beautiful forest is a land carved by forces both natural and man-made. Glacial errata - gigantic boulders, larger than a semi-truck, deposited by ancient glaciers before the trees took root - sit under a canopy that almost blocks out the sun. Broad, gnarled trunks rise into giant trees that may be hundreds or even thousands of years old. Winter sinks its fingers into the land for eight months out of the year, and the forest is dark, foggy, claustrophobic, and pulsating with a primal energy. We are only visitors in the deep woods, here.
Where the forests meet the sea, dramatic cliffs dominate one's field of vision - if a traveler can brave the icy temperatures. Just inland, steep hills rise before giving way to even more foreboding rocky peaks. Rank upon rank of trees - sitka spruce, douglas fir, western hemlock, red cedar, and more - seem to stoically face to the west, standing at attention to heed the twilight.
Should we begin to zoom in, we find surrounded by these endless forests a handful of cities - Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, and finally Juneau. These cities, once home to the roughest of men and the whores that both served and swindled them, have in modern times evolved into nests of wealth and futuristic technologies.
Our heroes, however, were drawn here from the much more humdrum Midwestern United States to be a part of what would be the last gasp of the Seattle's famous grit and grime. They found a city in conflict with itself - the artists, the writers, the poets, the wild children of the world, were all being slowly pushed out by the puppet-masters of the algorithm. We handed them their lunch and gave them their bill at restaurants we could never afford. We landscaped yards in neighborhoods that would not have us. We stayed in our bike lane, but were still cursed by arrogant voices from expensive imported cars. We watched as our beloved haunts, places of art and community and acceptance, were bought, torn down, and turned into soulless condominiums and predictable chain restaurants.
Their banal, copy-and-paste neighborhoods grew as our unique, one-of-a-kind communities broke under the strain. Zooming in further still, one could have found a certain young man struggling under contradictions and unacknowledged truths of his own. He had found a great love, but one that was doomed to die, and in no uncertain terms - a fact he had known from the start. As his place in the city faded, so too did the time he had left with his beloved. So too, did any reason he have to stay in his adopted home. But, although the writing was etched into every wall he passed, he remained blind to it by some flaw of character. Chiefly, his own stubbornness.
But the back pages of the story he and his love wrote together were to be the finest of them, as if the knowledge that none of this could last made each moment that much sweeter. And so, with the scene now properly set, let us introduce our protagonists.
Tomoko, twenty-five years old, and the child of an Irish-American traveler and a Japanese rebel, was of medium height, slender build, with Japanese eyes and Irish freckles. She was passionately in love with the world, and passionately in love with your humble narrator, yours truly. My name is Will. At the time, I was thirty, brown-haired and blue eyed, just a bit taller than Tomoko, and just as skinny. And I had never loved anyone - up until then, at least - as fully and as unconditionally as I loved Tomoko. I was determined that the last chapter of our romance be unforgettable, worthy of the woman. So, to that end...Won't you please get on the bus with me.
* * *
"Oh, man, what the fuck. It can not be time already," I croaked out in a pre-dawn voice as I swiped away the alarm on my phone. "All I can say is this had better be worth it."
"This was your idea, you big lug. Stiff upper lip. We ride at dawn," Tomoko said in a beleaguered tone. I have never, and will never, be a morning person. "Check the important stuff." She instructed me. I knew exactly what she meant. Two packs of cigarettes. Three-ish grams of fine, Northwestern cannabis. A bottle of whiskey - Evan Williams, to be precise, the best of the bottom shelf. There were also the two tickets for the Bolt Bus, our extra clothes, a blanket, and a few basic tools in case we had bicycle problems. It seemed we'd be prepared for anything. I grunted that it was all there.
Coffee and breakfast were quick and simple, preceded with weed and followed with a cigarette. It was just about six o'clock in the morning. Over-sized backpacks strapped on, we hopped on our bicycles - both fixed gear, red for Tomoko, blue for me - and cranked our way downtown through a light drizzle and unforgiving morning commuters.
The "Bolt Bus" was set to depart from downtown Seattle at seven o'clock sharp, and we were suitably early. Better safe than sorry. It was a three-hour trip south to Portland, Oregon, a city which both of us had heard about endlessly but had never visited. "It's like Seattle without all the Amazon employees" was the standard description among Seattle's greatest and grimiest youths, and this actually sounded fairly compelling to us at the time. We had finally made time to go give it a spin, and we planned to really make the most of it - as our packing itinerary might have given away.
