August 2019

It was August and I was on a plane headed north from Seattle to Juneau. It was the third time I’d pointed myself in the direction of Alaska, but the other times had been for visits—this time, I was staying. I brought my whole life with me in the size of three bags, a large duffel, a Hyperlight mountaineering pack, and a computer bag that held little more than clothes, a laptop, my camera, and a journal I’d neglected for the past eight months. I had sold the rest of what I owned just weeks before. It was the second time in my life that I’d sold everything and moved myself in geography, hoping that it would fix me. It was the first time I’d moved for love.

I was twenty-nine and had been drowning under a depression since the beginning of the year. Decades of piled up regrets and secrets made me feel like a stranger in my own body. Yet, despite the painful history that romance had imprinted on my early twenties, I thought the right person and the right love would grant me solitude from myself. As a kid, I’d thought that love would be something like a living room and a cozy fire, a sanctuary of safety and rest, a place where I didn’t have to face myself, and I guess I still believed that despite everything I’d experienced before I met Emily. 

After circling the airport once and hurtling through clouds for thirty minutes that had felt like an eternity, the airliner began to descend for landing. I looked out the window as we slipped below the clouds revealing the dark and placid waters of Auke Bay below. It looked much too cold for August, everything steel gray and veiled by a thin mist. As the earth came closer, I studied the lush green islands whose flanks rose steeply from the water and into the clouds, hiding their crowns somewhere above. My eyes fell to where the mountains broke against the sea and I thought of the millennium it takes to shape something, that as long as there are winds and tides and seasons there would be change. 

As we touched down and the solidness of the runway pressed up against the landing gear, I drew a shaky breath. I was here, I’d made it. Emily would pick me up in just over a half hour when she finished her last appointment, and I was glad to have the time to collect my thoughts. I’d just quit my job, broke the lease to my apartment, and left my friends behind in Seattle to join her even though we’d broken up in June. I didn’t know why I was doing what I was doing, except that my body gave me no other choice. I felt like a dislodged rock, careening forward, and drawn by an energy that wasn’t my own. 

What had I said to her, only a month before in my bedroom apartment? 

“If there is ever a time and space where we should be together again, I will welcome it. Until then, I guess this is goodbye.”

I said the words as if I wasn’t in control, as if I was reading a script from a lousy soap opera. 

We clutched messily at each other’s shoulders, embracing at the edge of the bed in which we’d made love only seven hours before. 

It was six in the morning in July, soft light flooded the room and glowed on her bare skin as she sat with her legs tucked under the gray linen covers. I was in my work clothes, rough Carhartt jeans, a stained flannel, and scuffed boots that clashed with the softness of her. I needed to leave or else I’d be late for work, but I believed it would be the last time I would ever hold her and I didn’t want it to end.

Why was I doing this? I wondered.

I was not well, and I didn’t know how to be. So, whether in an act of self-hatred or a desire to give her space for someone who could be the kind of love she deserved, I let go.  

In the weeks after she left, I felt everything in my body reject the reality that my decisions had imposed. It struck me less as a fantasy than an urgent need—like my life depended on it, on her and Alaska.

Looking back now, I still believe that was true. 

Barely a month into my lease, I cleaned my apartment for the last time, handed over the keys, and I left. 

I walked off the plane in Juneau and took the first step into the rest of my life.