September 2018 :: This month marks my arrival to Seattle 17 YEARS AGO. I arrived nervous and excited and ready to start college. Scared and also not scared. I realize that’s a contradiction, but I think I was somehow both at the same time. I remember being annoyed with my mom in that way that only teenage girls can be annoyed with their moms. Fighting in the car as we failed at navigating the maze of Seattle streets. Sitting with her in the school cafeteria too nervous to eat before my first college gymnastics practice. Saying goodbye in front of my dorm, my mom holding back tears and saying, “I’m jealous, you’re going to have so much fun.” (She was right.)

I could go on with more details of what I remember from those first days in Seattle, but the one that has stuck with me the strongest all these years is the way the air felt that week I arrived. Every September since, as summer was fading away (and I was trying to cling to to it, wishing it to last longer) I’d recognize that same damp, but crisp almost cold feeling in the air and remember my first days in Seattle.

As I say so frequently, I never planned on staying in Seattle as long as I did, but post college life unfolded and kept unfolding and kept keeping me there even in times when I really thought I wanted to move on.

This year is the first September in quite some time (17 years to be exact, how am I old enough to have done anything for 17 years?!) that I haven’t been in Seattle. I keep waiting to feel that fall feeling in the air as a reminder of what season it is and where I am.

I don’t think I’ve ever articulated this before, but I think that familiar air was also somehow a reminder that I was “making it”, a celebration that I’d made friends, survived college and moving to a new city, gotten jobs, made more friends and learned to love and really know a place.

I’m waiting for that feeling in the air and that reminder that I’m “making it”, but in my new city it’s currently 95 degrees outside and one thing I don’t have to do is wish for summer to last a little longer! I’m wearing shorts and drinking ice water by the liter. I’m starting to make friends, I’m building a business, I’m stepping towards love, I’m starting Portuguese classes in 2 weeks and we’ll probably spend this last weekend of September at the beach(!). I don’t know what September or October or November or December feel like here. I don’t have familiar holidays marking the time or nostalgia for the air feeling a certain way. In some ways, my life feels without its rhythms.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I’m glad I chose this , and 6 months in it seems important to acknowledge that it all still feels new, foreign even and I don’t know how its all gonna be. Most importantly, I think I need to remember that I’ve done this before. I mean not THIS exactly, but 17 years ago I arrived to a city where I knew no one and the Pacific Northwest compared to my high school days in the suburbs of Atlanta was certainly foreign. I was scared and not scared, kind of exactly like I feel now. I lived my way into a decision to be in a new place (that I now feel nostalgic for!), it was a decision I that I made in much the same way as I made this one — WITH MY HEART.