Stuck in Paradise

A week ago I signed a tax document sent via email. I noticed my husband had signed it a week before me, which was weird because the email had only been in my inbox for a few days. But when I checked the date of my email I realized it had been waiting in my inbox for twelve whole days. How did almost two weeks feel like just a few days? 

And why was it this mundane action that made me realize how time is slipping by? Borrowing a phrase from Queer Eye, my life has turned into wash, rinse, and repeat.

Getting married and then immediately entering a global pandemic where “can’t” dominated my life erased so much possibility I thought I still had. And now still isn’t the right time to make a big change. I want so many things and no matter what decision I make I feel like I’m giving something else up. Every time I feel like I’m coming around a corner the next milestone feels like it got further away while I wasn’t watching. I’ve felt stuck for a long time, like I don’t have complete ownership over my life.

Seattle skyline from a boat tour on a very hot day.

I have this fantasy of what my life would be like if I moved. I say fantasy because husband has no desire to leave our city, and would be genuinely depressed living where I want to live, and because it's borderline impossible unless I somehow make a shit ton more money, which is unlikely even if I left the nonprofit world. But it doesn’t mean I can’t indulge myself a little here.

I imagine us buying a townhome in West Seattle, where parks and nature and the water are less than a mile away. By then we’ve adopted a dog and can take bikes or even go on a long walk to the beaches. We have a small little yard, or at least a decent balcony, and there’s space to sit and read or work and grow plants. We’d be close to the neighborhood center and walk around in evenings and weekends, getting coffee at one of the many shops around, finding new favorite Vietnamese and Thai and Chinese restaurants, and drinking on brewery patios. Husband would open a new studio nearby and he’d bring the dog with him sometimes. He has photography friends he meets up with and we regularly see my friends and cousins who live in the state. Maybe once a year we drive east to see friends just over the mountains, and we take long weekends to visit the islands, take the dog hiking, even take longer trips to Montana and the rainforests.

Fresh wild blackberries!

In the townhome we have, that we own, we’re intentional about its design and layout. We take our time finding pieces that we love that fit our needs. We install permanent solutions that work for us, because it’s ours, and we both love the space that we’ve created. We’re surrounded by tall, green trees, maybe have a view of the sound from our top floor, and have tons of windows to let in as much natural light as possible. For a while we’ll have just the dog, who runs with us (in perfect year-round running weather), because she’s portable and we want to explore this new area. We’ll foster cats and small animals as often as we can, at least until we have a network we can turn to for cat sitting (I can’t not have a cat, not for long).

Dino topiary!

I think part of what makes this fantasy so appealing is it’s something to look forward to when one of the biggest parts of my current life changes. I’m intentionally not going far, or going for long, to spend as much time as I can with Chloe. Despite her age and early kidney disease she’s in remarkably good health. And is laying across my arms as I type this (slowly). Travel will be a consolation for a while, maybe finally going on our honeymoon and taking other extended international trips.

And now I couldn’t ask my partner to change everything about his life, which he absolutely loves, to go live somewhere he would have no close friends or family, have to rebuild his business from scratch, and feel isolated and lonely. After the wet and gloomy winter we had this year, I know that this move will remain a fantasy. It wouldn’t be a fantasy if my partner was miserable.

Seattle is not lacking in amazing beer.

Which means I need to figure out how to be happy living where I am. I didn’t want to live in one place my whole life, but practically speaking it’s not really feasible to move states, much less move countries (I have a similar fantasy about moving to the UK). But this is why we have fantasies, right? It'll be interesting to look back on this in a few years and see what's changed, what new fantasies I have, or what parts of this one might have come true.