— पांच हजार आठ सौ बावन —
The Grand Reunion finally happened last night: Ivan arrived, for his first visit since he moved out the last of his three times living at our place back in 2022—three years ago—and Shobhit also returned from his trip to Portland. The planets sort of aligned and Ivan had arrived in Portland from his trip to Las Vegas on Tuesday, and they both just happened to plan on coming back to Seattle yesterday. When Shobhit started a group chat in Facebook Messenger and told Ivan he would be on the 5:55 p.m. train northbound out of Portland on Thursday, Ivan said he would book the same train.
It's been a few years since I've written about hanging out with Ivan, but it's worth a reminder that although he's always said he's never been officially diagnosed, he is unquestionably neurodivergent. I only mention this because I have a feeling it's relevant to his obvious disinclination toward socializing with or even saying hi to Shobhit while they were on the same train. Maybe there's some specific kind of social anxiety to the scenario, maybe he just wanted his alone time to extend through the three-and-a-half-hour train ride, I don't really know. I just know that a neurotypical person would have been far more likely to meet up in one way or another on the train, maybe sit down together for a bit in the diner car, even just walk the train and say hi in passing. You can walk between cars on Amtrak trains, after all.
Ivan didn't even get to the train station until the very last second, and I must confess I wondered if that was deliberate as well. Ivan did not characterize it that way, instead telling us he always gets to the train at the very last second, but he also has a long history of bending the truth, which makes it difficult to fully wrap around how he thinks—possibly by design.
In any case, Shobhit got to the train station plenty early, mostly because he wanted to check his suitcase—there is no checking fee on Amtrak. He texted me at 4:51 that he was at the station and his bag was checked, and that was just over an hour before the departure time.
At 5:31, Shobhit texted that the train looked "pretty full." I noted that I had already checked the Amtrak website and the 5:55 train was listed as sold out. Shobhit replied: So maybe Ivan is not on it. I messaged Ivan at 5:35 to note that Shobhit was at the train station and we were wondering if he did indeed get a ticket for this train. At that time, Messenger indicated Ivan was last "active" 30 minutes before, and I realize in retrospect he was likely walking quickly from wherever he was coming from and that could explain how long it took for him to respond to any of our messages. At it was, I was soon texting Shobhit that if Ivan is on a later train then he'll just have to find his own way back to our place—the plan was for me to drive down and pick them both up at the same time.
Shobhit texted me at 5:40 that they had started boarding, and again at 5:55 when the train had started moving, right on time. At that moment, neither of us had yet heard back from Ivan—Shobhit had texted our group chat on Messenger at 5:50, and again there when the train started as well. His most recent text at that point noted that he didn't see Shobhit so he was now assuming Ivan was not on the train.
It may very well be true that Ivan just has a typical tendency to catch the train at the very last minute. I shouldn't make assumptions. But, I think it's also very likely that Ivan wouldn't have been keen to hang out at the station attempting to make small talk, even though that's largely what we did later once we got home. But our condo is a much more familiar communal environment and one Ivan has a long history with, stretching all the way back to 2014, with three stints of living in our guest room in the intervening time (eight months in 2014; fourteen and a half months from November 2016 to February 2018; and then nine and a half months from July 2021 through April 2022). He has to have made a conscious choice not to get to the station early, if not to get there seconds before the doors close.
Indeed, we finally heard from Ivan in the group chat at 5:58:
Haha, I hopped on at literally the last minute! He followed that up with,
I usually arrive at the train station approximately 20 seconds before the doors close. Okay, if you say so.
He then proceeded to spend the entire train ride making no effort to connect with Shobhit, even though Shobhit noted where he was on the train. I think Shobhit kind of inferred Ivan's desire for space when his last message to the group chat was,
Well glad you made it. I will see you when we get off. I am in car 3 by the dining car.
I headed down to the car at about a quarter to 9:00. I would have gone down a bit earlier even than that but I got swept up in a little project I was working on, on my computer. And then something pretty awful happened: my car key snapped off inside the latch in the trunk! The trunk was sticking a bit, and I wasn't even trying to lift it up with the key itself—I pulled up on it with my left hand. But then when the trunk opened and I went to pull the key out, it fucking snapped in half!
"Fuck!" I said, pretty loudly in the parking garage. "Fuuuuck! Fuck!"
I could not recall at all whether Shobhit had left his car key at home. He wouldn't have needed it, having taken the train to Portland (this was so I could drive the car to North Cascades National Park, which I did directly from King Street Station after I drove Shobhit there on Monday). I went back up to the condo, terrified that I would have no access to the car and would have to tell Shobhit
and Ivan that they were going to have to take public transit—I was so relieved when I saw Shobhit's key was hanging from the key rack.
I went back down to the car. I found that I could still open the trunk with my broken key, if I put it in just right. I was a little afraid of whether it would stop working after some luggage was put in there, but it worked out in the end.
Unsurprisingly, once I got to King Street Station, it was close enough to the train's arrival that all of the parking spots on the block of King Street leading to the west entrance to the station were taken. Luckily, there was one parking spot available on 2nd Avenue right off of King Street—it was a slightly tight squeeze. I could envision Shobhit being in the car and telling me it was too small, but I made it work. It wasn't far from the station at all.
So then I walked inside the station, which at just after 9:00 on a Thursday evening was pretty empty. It gave me a few minutes to admire the beauty of that station. I took a couple of pictures, something I'm kind of surprised I did not do for
my own solo train ride to Portland during my Birth Week in 2022: I took a couple of shots of the exterior but none of the interior of that beautiful station. I took one
in 2014 when I took the train to Portland (also during my Birth Week) with Karen, though.
Anyway, I didn't wait long before the train arrive and was unloading. I did walk to one of the doors and open it, surprised it was unlocked, only to immediately have a guy call out to me: "Sir! You have to wait inside." He locked that door a minute after that. So, I stood near the door the guy stood at with it open and waiting for the passengers once they disembarked and started walking in.
— पांच हजार आठ सौ बावन —
— पांच हजार आठ सौ बावन —
I don't know why I thought the dining car would have been closer to the front, which made me expect to see Shobhit first—but I saw Ivan first. He caught my eye, smiled big, and sort of pushed his face forward as he walked toward me in that way he does. He gave me his kind of patented "loose hug," with an arm wrap-around but without a true embrace. He's given me true hugs in the past, this has sort of been inconsistent over time and perhaps depends on his mood and frame of mind in the moment. Part of it was also that he had a heavy backpack slung over one shoulder.
Shobhit came along a couple of minutes later, and Ivan gave him a similarly awkard hug, honestly made a bit more awkward by Shobhit himself because he was too distracted by his focus on getting to the car. I had to tell them about the key break in the trunk key slot while we walked the block to the car. Shobhit was fine with the small risk of putting his suitcase in the trunk; Ivan took his bags with him into the backseat. I then had to get out again and open the trunk again to release Ivan's seatback because the seatbelt had been pinned beneath it after the last time I lowered the seats for putting my bike in through the trunk (for my trip to Fox Island at the end of May).
I drove us all home, and Ivan quickly made himself at home, commenting on the emptiness of the condo without the cats—the cats were both still alive and well when he was last here (Shanti died May 19 last year; Guru died July 1 last year). I was up for the next hour or so, the three of us chatting until about 11:00, covering a wide range of subjects, from Shobhit's consistently bonkers takes on Gaza to Ivan's further travel plans. This was when I learned that when Ivan moves on, on Monday, he plans to head up to Bellingham, where he worked for a year in 2019 but hasn't been since; and after that he plans to go to Vancouver, B.C., and even try to find a nursing job.
This was all very much news to me; I had totally assumed he would fly back to his parents' house in Lancaster, where he has consistently stayed between working gigs since 2022, but the jobs he's taken in that time have typically been in the broader northeast region. I had no idea he was looking to return to the Pacific Northwest. But, Ivan is fickle and changes his mind constantly, often at the last minute.
Still, it made me think of the last time he attempted to live and work in Vancouver, B.C.—in the last spring and early summer of 2018. That was where he went directly after his three months traveling Europe, which was what he did after moving out of our condo that year. His idea for Vancouver that time was to pivot away from nursing, which he was really sick of, and find some work in the cannabis industry. He had no luck with that, and complained at the time about how much less nurses get paid in Canada. He lasted there all of three months, and it was after that when he went to Bellingham for the next year (I went there to visit him there for my Birth Week in 2019).
The line he's taking this time is that he wants to try and find nursing in drug addiction recovery, which he likes a lot better than the many nursing homes he has worked in. He seems weirdly optimistic about the idea this time, although I can't imagine the pay rate issue is any different. I would bet money he'll last a few months again and then return to the States yet again. I guess we'll see. Luckily because his mother is Canadian, he has dual citizenship. If nothing else, this raises the prospect that Ivan will be in the Pacific Northwest region a lot longer than I thought, and perhaps I'll get to see him again within a few months rather than waiting another three years.
These past three years are, in fact, by a wide margin the longest I have gone without seeing Ivan, since we first met, when he sublet the guest room in 2014. The previous record was indeed the last break before that, between my visit with him in Bellingham in Apri 2019 and when he returned after many travels to move back in with us in July 2021—that was two years, and the pandemic outbreak occurred in between; he got stuck in New Zealand for a lot of that, which was isolating for him but also one of the best places for him to be, during a pandemic.
Although Ivan officially moved out on May 1 in 2022, he went to Vancouver Island and then on a cruise to Alaska, those trips taking up the month of May; he returned for one last weekend at the very beginning of June, before heading back to his parents' in Lancaster.
That was the last time I saw him, and when we drove him to drop him off at the Capitol Hill Light Rail station and Ivan and I got a very satisfactory goodbye, the part I have long had the most vivid memory of was when
he said, "I'll see you in two years," holding up two fingers when he said it. He inteded to come back for a visit in that amount of time.
Naturally, I have brought this up several times since last summer, which marked two years since he said that. He said last night that he would have liked to have come last year, "But I had work obligations." I think basically the way he lives his life is to take a well-paying job that he keeps for about a year, and then he spends whatever he's saved up by traveling. I don't know how long he can keep that up.
Shobhit actually said last night, "You haven't changed a bit." I would argue that, if only slightly: Ivan and I are nine years apart but share a birthday, and this year he turned 40—something I am certain he's not thrilled with. His continued obsession with skin treatments is fairly apparent (he still looks good, for the record), but I would say the youthful look he had for the longest time has faded slightly—he's closer to looking his age now. The exact same thing happened to me. I was also just thinking about how, even though he's nearly a decade younger than I am, now that he's 40, we are both squarely in "middle age" territory and the age different does feel markedly less pronounced. We'll see if I feel any differently after I turn 50 next year, but I take some weird comfort in this one single year in which we are both in our forties at the same time.
Ivan never talks about other friends, and he actually loves traveling alone, which is the only way he ever does it—he talked a bit about that last night as well. He's always guarded about any of the other people in his life (unless he's talking wild shit about family members or an ex he hates), but I would still bet that I have been the one consistent, good friend in his life for the past decade. I'm certain he doesn't think about that much at all, but I do, and I'm happy to be that for him. I'm really looking forward to getting to spend much of this weekend with him.
— पांच हजार आठ सौ बावन —
[posted 12:36pm]
