New Light in New Places

When I moved here, I remember sitting on the windowsill with the window open, watching the sunset. Despite all that was unsure, I was excited to see how the light changed throughout the seasons. See, I’ve never known a winter outside the Midwest. I’ve never seen the leaves change somewhere new, or what it feels like on that first warm spring day outside of Michigan or Illinois. 

Despite the fact that I was hurt (still am), and couldn’t walk from the window I was sitting on to the kitchen, I was excited to observe life here. 

Well, after a year in this place, I can tell you this:

In the fall, I could see Jupiter from my window. I could barely walk but good god if there wasn’t a day I didn’t wake up to see the sunrise. There was a heat wave in October, and I remember waking up to the wind smelling like pine and sea.

This was a hard season for me, and yet a beautiful one. I leaned hard on those who love me. I was homesick in a way I never have experienced before, and I still remember how I clung to my mother in the airport with tears in my eyes.

“I can see Jupiter, shining out of my window, that faces the south. Wrapped in darkness, the air smells like city, but it also smells like winter, like the lonely sea, like pine. 

There will come a day when I share this life with someone, but for now, it is just me. A girl who is staring out her window, young and in love, in awe at the turning of the world.”

“I think, really, this entire world we live in is a poem waiting to be told.“

In the winter the light pours into my room. The sun is low, and my windows face South. I woke up just early enough so that I could watch the day before it even began. It’s my favorite thing about winter. And every day I could, I watched the clouds turn purple, then pink, then orange. 

In the middle of the day, I had to draw my blinds in order to work. But I would always let the sun warm me first, I would let it wrap it arms around me as the light reached deep into my room. 

It gets dark early. By 11:30 am the sun has already crawled across my desk and out of my direct line of sight so I can pull the shades again. By the time I’m almost done with work, I move to the living room while I watch the sun set directly west of us. 

In the Winter, I was still deep in the throes of an injury, but I was falling in love, and biking again did not feel so different from flying to me. I saw snow in Chicago, and felt a warm day in January.

“Tell me dear, was your coffee warm this morning? Does your heart not feel like honey? And who is saying you can’t?”

In the Spring our AC didn’t turn on until the end of May, despite how much I paid for this place. I spent an entire month with my window open, letting the wind sit next to me day in and day out like an old friend. I met people from the Midwest that I immediately felt connected to. I made it back to the mountains again, to Illinois and Michigan, here and there. Warmer weekends were spent on a bike, or outside somewhere. Two friends came to visit me, and I went to the Atlantic as often as I possibly could.

“There are things I want to do in this life. People I want to love. And, has anyone told the birds that 3:30 am is too early to sing?”

“And what a blessing is it, that I have friends that feel connected to me on the open road.”

In the summer, the light is deep, and rich. The sun sets behind a building north of us, but we can still watch the clouds change from orange, to pink, to purple, slower now, even though life seems to be moving much much quicker. I never need to draw the shades. On the solstice the sun is just high enough that it reaches my hands, but not my eyes. 

This season I drift from state to state, camping and then driving and then having my dear friends come to visit. So much is different from a year ago. I am still fighting the fear of being continuously hurt, but I bought myself flowers the other week, and when I look back at all the cups of coffee I have had at this desk I am writing at now, I remember exactly how I have learned to love, every second of every day.

“I am so grateful now, to be living so close to the sea. There is something so familiar about this, about the salt clinging to my eyelashes, the wash of the current that feels like hug. I adjust to the cold, and I swim.”

“The better days will come back again. But for now, last night I held someone I loved while he slept. I ate ice cream outside in the twilight hour and made good food. The hallway smelled like ocean today and I’m calling my best friend tonight.”

Time moved especially quickly this year, and I struggle now, thinking I spent far too much time with my head shoved in a screen. But then I look back, and I remember that first bike ride through my favorite park in the fall, the way the morning sun hits the buildings, and all the times I had those incredible fish tacos across the street. I can tell you at least 5 times I laughed until I cried in this room, and where I first sat on my first day here. I can recall exactly what the sun felt like on a Monday morning in February, and I can tell you what time it is, at any time of the year, based on where the light is on my desk. 

It’s funny how rooms, when you first walk into them, feel so full of potential. And when you leave them, and you take all the decorations down and hear the echo of your voice on the empty walls, they feel so big and scary.

But see, the thing about emptying one room, is that you’re making room for another. I have always loved moving. I equate it with a new chapter, hitting the refresh button. But it’s always bittersweet. Because the place you’re leaving isn’t just a place, when you’ve learned exactly how the light tastes in deep February. When you’ve fallen in love, cried on the floor more times than you can count, laughed, and grown there. 

In the meantime, I have cards in my desk written to me by people who love me that will come with me to my next place. And maybe in another life, I’ll go downstairs and play basketball with the kids outside. 

“And at the end of the day, I will always belong to the open road. The crashing waves on a rocky, foggy beach, the wind in the trees, myself, and all those that love me.”