A Place Only Exists as it is in This Moment

Immersing myself in the ephemerality of being

I am moving and it is really hard.

Ten weeks ago a surgeon sliced into my back and removed bone fragments from my spine.

Fourteen weeks ago I woke up and could not walk.

Summer Art Sale

Fifteen weeks ago I had my life all planned out. I was teaching yoga several times a week. I was revising my book. I had freelance assignments. I knew I was moving to Florida, but the concept wasn’t daunting. I would move as I always had— without too much difficulty.

Moving is much different when I feel like my body is still healing. When my nerve fibers speak to me in ways they didn’t before.

This is the truth: I will never be able to properly say goodbye to Seattle, because I love it so much, and because so much of my history lives here, even as the city is torn down and rebuilt into something different and more homogenous.

I have taken so many walks in the past three months and yet I feel that I cannot take enough walks.

I walk to Gasworks Park in the waning dusk and the smells of lilies and jasmine and parched cedar bark and roses and cooling asphalt melt all around me and I inhale and think, I will always remember this. If I am lucky I will always remember this, as I remember all the places I have loved.

It’s not that Seattle won’t be here anymore, but that it will never exist as it does in these moments, and I will never again exist as I do in these moments, and it’s impossible to grasp anything in life with a firm grip because life is ephemeral, like wispy clouds in the sky during a sunset, always changing and shifting, becoming more and more beautiful until the light fades and they are just clouds again.

This spring and summer I have noticed the flowers like never before. It’s my walks, I know. And my neighborhood, Wallingford, where most yards don’t sport lawns but landscaping, and homeowners love to plant flowers and native plants.

I treasure each yard and each house. In June there was a house whose rhododendrons bloomed on top of each others, and I walked by that house often, and watched how they blossomed and brightened and then slowly faded and their petals shuddered into droopy brown flaps hanging from their stalks and messed the sidewalk like discarded trash, and they will bloom again next year and I won’t be here.

Then there’s the house with the irises— tens of different breeds of irises, all labeled so that walkers can admire them and know them like the one who tenderly planted their bulbs knows them. The late-blooming lilac bush in their neighbors yard gushed its pheromones into the soft breeze so it felt like the irises were also scented. It will all bloom next year and I won’t be here.

I am sad, and not sad.

I am excited for what is to come. I fly out tomorrow, with Edna.

But aren’t you excited???

Someone asked me that, and I wondered, what spurs us to ask questions like that? That “but,” its meaning so potent. We are taught in America that we must be excited. We are taught that the future holds so much. We are taught to look straight ahead.

But I want to be here, and feel all of this.

Feeling things is part of being a writer.

I am excited for what is to come, but what is to come is also ephemeral, life is ephemeral, sand is straining through my fingers and as it falls into itself the grains I held in my hand are lost and I will never hold that specific mixture of sand again.

It means so much to let myself be inside that not knowing.

Seattle will always be here is what people keep saying to me.

But that is a lie. A beautiful, wonderful lie.

Our lives would be so empty if everything were always here, as it is, all the time, unchanging.

Yet the changing, and the inevitability of loss, is what breaks my heart. It’s also what makes me love so fiercely, knowing that what exists in this moment will never exist again as it is.

Friends, I must go pack more boxes into my car, to give away and to mail to myself in Florida. I have to return the rental car at noon. Tonight is my last night in Seattle. I will watch the sunset from Gasworks, and maybe cry. I will definitely cry. I have started crying now, as I write this.

There are no words to describe what this city has meant to me. And yet, it is not my city.

I have watched all the flowers bloom and wonder which flowers I will miss. I will miss the dull, rotting dirt smell of autumn and the fading of the heat in the air. I will not be here for the ten months of rain (and I am okay with that).

If it were raining now, I would be flipping the city my middle finger and happily leaving, but this is the most beautiful month here, and the city shoves it bouquet into my face and smothers me in sun and says, here, for you. I love you, too.

I love you, too.