Losing Kate

Today is my last full day on Solomons Island and we’re mostly prepared for the road trip back home to Atlanta. The cats are drugged up, already a little glassy eyed from the anxiety meds. The car snacks have been purchased. A plan has been made to pack.

I’m looking forward to home. I miss my bed. I miss my couch. I miss my pizza place. And I’ve just about hit my limit trying to avoid our landlord on my way to go read on the porch.

But I’m really going to miss this place.

Maybe that’s a surprise from the last post I made—I think it would have surprised three weeks ago Kate—but I think the shape of the future is starting to reveal itself to me.

There is a small little town square near the water with a cocktail bar, fine dining, and cat cafe. There is a coffee shop lined with used books for sale. There is a diner where the waitress already recognizes us and our orders. I keep the windows open and let the breeze into our little room. The cats are mesmerized by the sounds of birds.

It’s quiet. It’s slow. I’ve been chatting with strangers more. For some reason in the city, striking up a conversation with someone feels like I’m inconveniencing them. Honestly, when people try to talk to me in Atlanta, I feel slightly inconvenienced.

I have places to be. People to see. Things to do.

But here, I’ve talked with a local farmer at the farmers market, I’ve showed and received cat pictures from a waitress, chatted up a live musician, and soaked in the knowledge from multiple volunteer historic small boat craft guild members.

I don’t know what my days will be when we’re here in two years, but I’m more hopeful than when all I saw were some stale strip malls and scrawling suburbs.

And now I’m left with a strange feeling. Leaving a place that will soon become home for a place that I will leave—I place I knew I would always leave.

How do I return to the impermanence of it all? A job I will quit. An apartment I will empty. Friends that will scatter far from us.

I began this journey not sure what I would have to look forward to, and I end it not sure what to do in the mean time. The same melancholy with a different mask.

And this might be boring, but I think the solution is the same as before. I need to stop getting ahead of myself. Because the reality is we will go back to our apartment, put the AC back to 67, squash some roaches, and watch Justice League on the couch before falling asleep in a bed with carved out grooves formed by my husband and I.

That doesn’t get rid of the strange sad feeling of limbo, waiting for a future glimpsed but not yet realized. But if I’m being honest, I don’t know that I mind the feeling.

It is certainly better than the wild fear of not knowing if tomorrow will be any better, almost certain that it won’t. Grief has shrouded my early twenties so much so that it feels like a haze that passed me by.

And now that I’m out of the fog, I can’t be mad that the future is uncertain because I was once certain it would always be the darkest day.

And thank goodness I was wrong. The night has broken, and the waves ripple with the glowing light of sunrise.