This weekend I journeyed back to Seattle, the city that isn’t my city, the city that does not belong to me, yet I somehow belong to it. Even in the drizzly rain, the soggy, mud-strewn flyers littering the streets of Capitol Hill made sense–signaled to me my relation to this land. I only stayed there for six weeks in 2010, but going back felt more like going home–a real home, one that belongs to me, one that is tied more to who I am than where I’ve come from–than anywhere I’ve ever been.

I have to find my way back.

Dallas is a blur. It helps that it rained and is overcast today, and that I live in a fairly lush, walkable section of an otherwise vast land of concrete and infrastructure. But I know my time here must surely take me back there. It helps that I saw friends–real friends–people who write, who think, who understand, and who take me for what I am. My group here is slowly dispersing–with lives to be lived in California, North Carolina, Michigan…yet my feet tap in the muddy puddles of Dallas and wait, wait, wait, trying to avoid the cracks that would swallow me if I stopped long enough.

Something about standing on a water taxi, the wind slashing through my hair and the waves knifing into frothy white possibility beneath us; something about hiking up a fairyland road with nothing but ferns and dripping green trees arching over my head; something about stepping off a train and stumbling into a mass protest, the dirt, the sweat, the people thronging together to demand fairness… A coffee shop on every corner, a city where vegan isn’t a dirty word, and books, oh, the sweet scent of books that carries on the air.

Seattle. I’ve left you but will find you again.