Goodbye washington. goodbye dry, cold, empty air and perpetually gray skies. Goodbye drizzling rain and hazy fog. Goodbye sleepy mountains, sleepy towns, sleepy people. Goodbye dark earth and ferns and mushrooms and everything being just slightly damp at all times. Goodbye pine needles in my shoes. Goodbye endless labyrinthine wilderness filled with trees so tall you feel like an ant under them. Goodbye salty seas and crabs under rocks and whalewatching and driftwood and coastal wind slicing your dry skin as you squint at the horizon. Goodbye to the place where the forest and the water become one. Goodbye to watching the ocean dance under the moon.

I've lived here my whole life, but i've never seen the beauty i see now that i'm finally leaving. my wish of 17 long, hard years is coming true. its bittersweet.

as much as I complain, it's no wonder this place inspires poetry. It's the most beautiful natural wonder in the country. But there's also a perpetual lingering sadness. it's our identity, we can't live without it. From a death cab song, "How can I stay in the sun when the rain flows all through my veins?" Us pacific northwesterners are too used to the cold and dark. When you're sad for long enough, it just becomes who you are. We hold onto it because it ties us together, our shared self-enforced gloom. we're like vampires who cringe away from sunlight, smiles, friendly faces, because we think we're too good for it. Maybe there is beauty in suffering. or suffering for beauty. it makes us pure. Tom Robbins said "October lies on the Skagit like a wet rag on a salad. Trapped beneath low clouds, the valley is damp and green and full of sad memories. The people of the valley have far less to be unhappy about than many who live elsewhere in America, but, still, an aboriginal sadness clings like the dew to their region.... it has dignity, fertility and hints of inner meaning—but nothing can seem to make it laugh." driving through skagit valley feels like being lost in a memory that's just nostalgic enough to be comforting and painful all at once. but with the dreamlike, blurry swamp swirling around you and the mountains looming over you on either side, it also sort of feels like being cradled by a promordial mother. like the earth is going to swallow you whole and turn your bones and your stupid material worries back into mud that pine saplings and ferns will sprout from. you can decide if that's a good thing or not.

"one day we'll settle in seattle." to me the downpour doesn't feel all that loving. but to someone from the sweltering, dry desert, it probably seems like a paradise here. i wish i could appreciate it with the fresh eyes of an outsider. In Pete Wentz's evil not-autobiography he waxes about driving through the northwest on tour. "Seattle, the glimmering emerald in the bosom of the mountains. Mount Rainier over our left shoulders.... Trees for miles, patches of bright red clay, God’s dirt, the best there is. So clean and fresh, I almost consider shipping some back to the kids in the skyscrapers of Chicago, because they don’t know what they’re missing. Because words will never do it Justice. At night the sky is lit with a million jumbled stars, scattered across sheets of velvet. The stars out West are jokes on city kids like me. They make you feel insignificant, they put you in your place. The rain and the fog are almost invitations to slip this bus off the road, into the trees, the sounds of glass shattering and metal bending, one wheel still spinning and the smell of pine cutting so hard. I'd be okay with dying in the woods just off Interstate 5." even city kids like pete aren't immune to the suicidal love affair this place draws people into, like a siren luring sailors into the murky depths of the ocean. They set horror here for a reason too. Jennifer's Body (well, they filmed it here anyway), Twilight, The Ring (that blue color grading is so seattle), Twin Peaks, Coraline. There's some evil here too, something sinister. Something just past the edge of reality and sanity.

and im leaving all that magic behind, bound for boring, flat wisconsin. for cornfields and dry grass and trees that become skeletons in the winter. for lakes masquerading as oceans as if they could compare. for trips to chicago every weekend and visiting the places my favorite bands hung out. for some tired, tranquil place where the weather won't get trapped inside my bones. A place where people have sympathetic faces and starting conversations with strangers on the street isn't alien. Maybe it'll be home. i don't know yet. but something's gotta happen soon. I know I can't keep living in this dead or dying dream. no matter how beautifully sad it is. because sorrow gets too heavy and i can't carry it anymore. forget about that potential lover and the girls i knew there, i'm leaving it all behind.

music for this month: bright eyes (obviously), death cab, remember maine, letters to cleo, ethel cain, alex g, silverstein, brand new (always)