I was flying back from Seattle, my home of seven years, and where I had spent two luxurious weeks visiting with friends, celebrating a wedding, and remembering the riot of spring. Cherry blossoms, dogwoods, tulips, magnolias. Spring in Seattle is a time of carpet petals and palm-sized camellia flowers that fall, often unblemished, directly to the grass. It is a time of chill winds and spitting rain and oddly timed sunbreaks, too, but I couldn't help but feel that I'd picked an almost tropical locale as snow continued to drift in my hometown and the thermometer dropped back down to winter temperatures.
What does it feel like to be back in Seattle? It's an odd disjunction--more familiar to me in many senses than my life in Jackson, and yet the tugs of loyalty to Wyoming were there, too, as if, in choosing to spend these months in the mountains, I must swear fealty again to my vision, even as the warmth of my friends and the verdant scenery were things I could slip back into so naturally. I caught up with my friend Jessica, who now makes her home in the Bay Area after years spent in Seattle as well, and she remarked that visiting the city now feels like it once did to visit her hometown. This seems about right: the instant, comforting embrace of the known, not tinged by nostalgia, but rather by a deep sense of recognition. A marvel over what has changed, and yet an ease with what has not been forgotten: the buses I take, where we should choose a restaurant, where I should buy a book of poetry.
It's been months since I've ridden buses, and while I sat on one reading, I realized that the city had created a mode of thought for me in the rhythm of how I got from place to place; in the cadence of my walking, in my notation of businesses I passed, in my constant state of being around others in public spaces, and yet often burrowed into my own solitude. It was the same as I rode the bus from Portland to Seattle on a Sunday evening, a continuing drama of glowering clouds, rainbows, and sun outside the windows. I tried to take a picture of the clouds out of the glass, but I ended up taking one with the strip of setting sun from the opposite aisle smeared along the bottom of the frame. Like a double exposure or two counterpanes, tissue-thin, existing side by side. This was the feeling of being in Seattle. My old life close enough to taste and easy enough to resume, my new one waiting anxiously, afraid of being abandoned.
