Not Waking Up in the Pacific Northwets

There is something profoundly strange about opening my eyes and realizing I am no longer in the Pacific Northwest.

Or, as I have called it more than once, the Pacific Northwets.

I no longer wake beneath that soft gray ceiling that hangs over western Washington. There are no evergreens outside my window standing dark and watchful in the mist. No cool marine air sneaking through the cracks. No mountains lingering on the horizon, appearing only when the clouds decide we have earned the privilege of seeing them.

Instead, I wake up in Arkansas.

Arkansas, where the air has weight.

Arkansas, where September apparently did not receive the memo that summer is supposed to be packing its bags. Arkansas, where the heat does not merely surround you—it climbs into your bra, sits down, and makes itself comfortable.

And every morning, for the first few seconds after I wake up, my mind has not caught up with my body.

I am still in Everett.

I am still in the apartment where hummingbirds visited the balcony and a squirrel occasionally wandered by like he was checking whether rent had been paid. I am still near the water, near the mountains, near roads bordered by trees so enormous and green that they made the world feel ancient.

Then the room comes into focus.

The light is different. The air is different. The sounds are different.

And I remember:

I left.

I really did it.

I put Seattle in the rearview mirror and drove away.

It is surreal in the way that only a complete life change can be surreal. Your body arrives before your mind does. Your belongings may or may not arrive at all, particularly when U-Haul decides to send your moving cube on its own private hero’s journey. You find yourself living out of a suitcase, negotiating territorial disputes among four deeply offended cats, and trying to build a new life while half of the old one is still scattered somewhere between Washington and Arkansas.

Nothing feels entirely real yet.

I know where I am, but I have not fully learned how to be here.

For two years, the Pacific Northwest was home. It was also hardship. It held some of the most beautiful moments of my life and some of the most difficult. It gave me salt water, mountain roads, moss-covered trees, ferries, gray skies, and breathtaking views around almost every bend.

It also gave me loneliness.

It gave me distance from the people I love. It gave me Seattle traffic, astronomical rent, bureaucracy, illness, an accident, and more than one season in which simply surviving required everything I had.

My time there was both heaven and hell.

Sometimes on the same Tuesday.

That is the complicated truth about leaving a place: you do not have to hate it to know you need to go.

You can love the mountains and still admit that you were drowning beneath them. You can treasure the view and still recognize that the life surrounding it no longer fits. You can grieve the trees, the rain, and the cool morning air while knowing—deep in your bones—that leaving was the right thing to do.

And this was the right thing to do.

That truth is beginning to settle into me.

I am closer to family now. Closer to the people who know who I am without requiring an explanation or a résumé. I am back in a landscape that holds my history, even if I am returning as someone profoundly changed by everything that happened while I was away.

There is comfort in familiar voices.

There is comfort in knowing that my mother, sons, and more importantly that grandbaby, is not thousands of miles away. There is comfort in roads that lead to people I love instead of airports, connecting flights, and carefully calculated vacation days.

There is comfort in no longer feeling like Dakota and I are trying to hold up an entire life with our bare hands while standing alone at the farthest corner of the country.

That does not mean the landing has been graceful.

Good gods, no.

This has been less of a gentle homecoming and more of an emergency reentry accompanied by pneumonia, financial panic, missing belongings, confused cats, delayed checks, and enough logistical nonsense to make a lesser woman lie facedown on the floor and become part of the carpet.

To be fair, I have considered it.

But underneath all the chaos, something is changing.

I can feel the tension beginning to loosen.

Not all at once. Not dramatically. There has been no cinematic moment in which the music swelled, the clouds parted, and I knew with absolute certainty that everything would be fine.

It is quieter than that.

It is the realization that I do not have to calculate the distance between myself and everyone I love.

It is the possibility of being present for ordinary moments instead of only major events.

It is knowing that a family visit no longer requires thousands of dollars, airport security, a wheelchair request, and the kind of strategic planning generally reserved for military invasions.

It is the strange, tender recognition that I am not merely visiting.

I live here now.

Those words still feel peculiar.

I live here now.

My roots have been lifted, carried across mountains and plains, and pressed back into Southern soil. They have not taken hold yet. Roots do not work that quickly. For a while, everything feels loose and vulnerable. The old ground still clings to them. The new ground has not completely closed around them.

That is where I am.

Between the uprooting and the growing.

I miss the Pacific Northwest. I suspect I always will. Certain places get into your bloodstream, and Washington did that to me. I will miss fog over the water. I will miss evergreen shadows and mountain silhouettes. I will miss those rare crystalline days when the sky turned blue and Mount Rainier appeared so enormous and impossible that it looked like the work of an overly ambitious god.

But missing something does not mean you made a mistake by leaving it.

Sometimes grief is simply proof that a place mattered.

Washington mattered.

The life I am building now matters too.

So I wake up beneath a different sky. I listen to different sounds. I step outside and immediately begin sweating in places the human body should not possess sweat glands.

And slowly, I remember that this is not a vacation.

This is not a temporary stop.

This is home—or at least, it is becoming home.

It still feels surreal.

But for the first time in a long time, surreal does not feel frightening.

It feels like possibility.

It feels like being closer to the people who love me.

It feels like finally admitting that a beautiful place is not always the place where you are meant to stay.

It feels strange.

It feels unfinished.

It feels good.