Travelogue ~ Seattle Redux

I’ve been back in Seattle for about a week now, and it’s been a much stranger experience than I was expecting. I realized that this is the first time, at least as an adult, that I’ve come for a finite visit instead of arriving home, or just moving back altogether from one less-than-exotic locale or another. So I’m not quite a tourist, but I’m not “home for break”… and Miami isn’t quite home either, so I guess I’m back to being a nomad again. I guess that’s par for the course for me, since I have trouble feeling settled down anywhere.

When I was on my way to Florida I had the opportunity to visit or pass by, all in a row, pretty much every place I’ve lived in the last ten years and even before- from my parents’ house in the ‘burbs to a slew of old apartments and houses scattered through Seattle neighborhoods, to haunts further afield. I didn’t get to Michigan since it was a little too out of the way, but my mom came down to see me in Fort Wayne and we spent the day in the weird little city I used to live in once upon a time. Got brunch downtown, ran around a bit to look at the architecture but it was bitterly cold (mid-November) so we went to the botanical garden which was a good way for us to nerd out and have something to talk about. We actually parted ways at the apartment building Demi and I used to live in… it was strange; I found myself inspecting the remodel they had promised us when we were still living there, and pointing out our old apartment (over the X-Men pool!).

It’s strange to miss a place in which I never planned on staying. I felt about it rather the way I feel about Miami- it’s not going to be home forever, and I don’t want it to be home forever, but it’s damn good for the time I’m supposed to be there. Living downtown in Fort Wayne was like getting a snip of the life that seems permanently out of reach for me in Seattle: living downtown in a nice apartment with a smashing view and interesting(!) neighbors, walking to the library, walking around the pretty, underused parks the city loves to plug money into, having a decently paying job (it was terrible for the soul though- don’t miss the job a bit), going out to eat without sweating the bill, paying off debt, PAYING OFF DEBT!, saving money and still living well, taking decent vacations, cooking at home… anyway yeah. It’s a shame about the locale, because that was the first (only?) time that I genuinely felt like I had my shit together. When I came back to Seattle it took everything I had in the bank, and in me, but I did it and did it well. But I don’t feel like I’ve ever recovered to anything approaching that point- not materially, which isn’t so important really, but feeling like I don’t have to scramble. I felt like I started just treading water when I got to Seattle and never stopped. Which is why being back here for a bit, and contemplating moving back permanently, terrifies me to no end now that I stop and think about it.

Seattle is a place I know inside out. Being here and working at my old job for a couple weeks has really hit that home for me… I got in the delivery car and drove all over town without missing a beat- the traffic light timing, which homeless people are at which bus stops, knowing that if I drive down Pike Place at 5:13am I’ll see the Bainbridge ferry over the market rooftop, but if it’s 5:16 it’ll be out of view and pulling into the slip already, all that. I got off the plane at Sea-Tac and gave directions to two different people at the baggage claim; I can walk down the street and know when to catch a bus without looking at the schedule. On a geographic level, which is how I instinctively measure cities, I’ve mastered Seattle. I’ve beat the last boss already. That was my benchmark for “knowing” Fort Wayne, and Flint, and the Ft. Laud/Hollywood/Miami megalopolis I function in now.

But Seattle is the place I run away to from other places, or get sucked back to, or come back to after going off on other adventures. In one way I know I’ll probably end up here permanently- I’m pretty much done with the US as far as wanting to settle other places… my list of ideal perma-homes amounts to Seattle, Vancouver B.C., Toronto, Portland maybe, and various environs in Alaska if I for some reason felt the need to become more of a small-town type. I’m just afraid that coming back here too soon is giving up somehow, or that I’ll do it prematurely, like last time, and never really recover. And I’m so tired of scrambling, of that nagging spatial insecurity. Hopefully I can put my finger on the source of it while I’m in Florida, because I don’t think I can come back here for good until I figure it out.