After the weekend before last, I feel very, very clear on the fact that life on the island would fit my wants and needs very nicely. I’ve known for a long time that I wanted, at some point in my life, to live more quietly, more rural, I just thought it was going to be a bit more down the road than this. But I think the only reason I thought that was that I didn’t see it as feasible any earlier. It is, in fact, feasible sooner, as feasible as living exactly where I am is. In some ways, it may be even more so.
The whole weekend, I kept doing that thing one does in a heavenly place, where you say to yourself, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if I could live here?” Usually, when I’m somewhere where I say that to myself, it’s a pipe dream. In this case, every time I thought that, I’d then remember that I CAN live there. The rents and expenses are really no better or worse than they are in the city, everything I have here on the mainland I could have on that island, and getting to the city from Bainbridge (there are other islands, but this would be the most convenient for me) is exceptionally easy and highly pleasant. I know locals here kvetch about the ferries a lot, but having grown up with subways and inner-city buses, I tend to find them a far more pleasant means of transportation than what I usually ride on. I wouldn’t have to take the ferry much anyway, as I really only need to be in the city for outreach/clinic work two times a week at a maximum. And two of our clinic staff live on the island, so carpooling is also an option.
I just felt better there, separate from the fact that I was also there visiting with Blue, who I hadn’t seen in five weeks. I breathed more deeply, my skin looked immediately better. I could walk out on the porch in the morning stark naked without anyone’s notice or care and take a soak; have my first sip of coffee with the moist breeze on my skin. The quiet both soothed and inspired, and the company of trees, ferns, birds and water felt more like me these days than the company of tall buildings, construction detritus, bar mania and a ton of people everywhere I turn. The rhythm of the day there fit my own so well, sending me to sleep early and rousing me to wake before the sun came up. Doing the dishes by hand felt better than loading them into a machine: doing simple things and doing them more simply is so grounding for me. Taking a long hike on the dirt felt better than a walk on the pavement. The people were warmer, everything was smaller; more intimate, yet more private all at once. My head felt more clear, my heart more at rest, to the point that I could put most thoughts of work away save flashes of inspiration.
I felt much more like island people than mainland people. I felt much more at home. I felt much more like myself, much more like I fit, than I have felt in Seattle.
While I was there, I started to do some planning. Ultimately, if I could sell another book in the next six months, I could handle the financial aspects of this move with incredible ease. It’d be doable without that, but that would make it nearly a cash cakewalk. I will need to find myself some kind of reliable junker to drive, which means a) getting a new license (I let my old one expire ten years ago, having no need of it), and b) purchasing said vehicle. I may also need to consider finding a roomie, but I may not: it really depends on what I can find to rent for myself or not. In a lot of ways, I’ve felt so alone in my own home over the past couple of years, as well as in this city, that literally being alone, not just feeling alone, seems very important and like the right thing for me.
I do think that as much as I have always loved the solitude of being in more isolated spaces, and as much as I need to be alone in the near future, it will probably take some adjusting on my end to be out there alone. But I realized there is a very easy and fantastic solution to that matter, which is simply calling and emailing some of the people in the world I love and miss the most and inviting them to come stay somewhere beautiful with me for a week or two during the first few months after I move.
Briana is going to come up here to visit in June or July, and wants to come see the island with me, too. (Mya is coming around then, too, maybe I’ll drag her over for a day, as well.) I’d love more than anything for she and The Baby Liam (who isn’t a baby anymore, but I plan to call him that well into his adulthood, in alignment with my job as his obnoxious auntie) to be close to me, even to live with me, but given custody arrangements with his father, that may or may not be an option. But it’s likely also possible for the two of them to be on one of those visits when I love, regardless. I can also ask Becca, Elise, Christa, Mark, Mya, Heath, Fish, my mother, my father…any number of people who I’d love visits with anyway. I think it’s a workable plan.
I don’t know when it will happen, but I’m thinking fall or winter. Like I said before, one of the toughest parts of this is that my moving out of the city at all also equals my moving out from my living arrangement with Mark, and even thinking about that is so very hard and makes me feel tremendously sad. It’s probably right for us, regardless, to start moving towards not living together, but that doesn’t make it easy, and it’s something very heavy in the lightness of my feelings about being somewhere else where I think I will be happy as far as my location goes.
And as I’m talking about somewhere else, I’m packing to go somewhere else yet again. After a week from hell where I have had to be on way, way too much, I’m heading back to Chicago for a week to visit family, get some grant work started, to spend a few days with Fish (who moved from here to there a few months ago, go figure) and to see Blue. AND, perhaps coolest of all, to have a 5th grade slumber party reunion with two of my other closest friends as a child who I haven’t seen in decades. I don’t know if there’s much cooler than that.
What I do know is that I’m wiped and need a soft, warm bed. And that the idea of having it somewhere as lovely as the islands is a marvelous — and attainable! — daydream.
