Seattle Saudade
By: M Julian
Tags: Writing, Personal Essay, Nonfiction, Seattle, Saudade

Seattle Saudade

This month marks the longest I’ve stayed in one place in the past decade, which has been full of false starts and frustrated aspirations, always going back to square one. This is home now. I’ve gotten to know the city well. But I never really moved here; I sort of just ended up here after an aimless peregrination that included working on a boat on the Columbia River, living at a Buddhist monastery for a month, and working on a goat farm for three weeks. After three years I find myself getting restless again.

I’m from a small town in Northern California 50 miles north of Sacramento, surrounded by miles of rice fields and orchards. The town itself is made up of fast food and restaurant chains, grocery stores, banks, two high schools and not much else. 10 miles out of town are the Sutter Buttes, the “smallest mountain range in the world” (though I don’t think that is an official or scientific attribution), a huddle of extinct volcanic outcroppings that rise surreptitiously above the valley that are almost entirely privately owned. I lived in the same two-bedroom apartment with my mother for the first thirty years of my life. My graduating class was thirty people. I was always trying to leave but always found myself coming back, oscillating between answering the call to adventure and the desire for comfort and security.

I first came to Seattle in September of 2015 while doing a publishing internship in Port Townsend on the Olympic Peninsula. One of my fellow interns was from Seattle and shared a house there with three or four other people and went back there on the weekends. I remember my first ferry ride from Bainbridge Island to Seattle. The sun was shining through billows of clouds as I stood on the deck and watched the city skyline come into view. I am forever proud of myself that I didn’t do the whole Titanic “I’m king of the world” thing like I saw several other people doing. As I know now it’s a dead giveaway that you are a tourist.

Nothing came of the internship and I ended up moving back home and getting a job at Target.Two years later, though, after working on a boat for a summer on the Columbia and Snake Rivers, going back and forth from Astoria to Clarkston and putting away about ten grand, I had the opportunity to move back to Washington to house sit for a few weeks and eventually found a place in the city.

It was the end of November, so of course it was raining. I rode the ferry from Bainbridge Island where I had been staying with a friend, with my suitcase and backpack in tow. I caught the bus in downtown and rode it across the blue and orange Fremont bridge into Wallingford where I was renting out a room on the third level of a craftsman three blocks from Greenlake. I dropped off my effects and caught the bus again to go to my first job interview, but caught the wrong route and ended up in Sandpoint when I needed to get to the Industrial District. If you know Seattle you can imagine my grief, but I was oddly calm and found it pretty comical.

Within a week I got a job at Goodwill loading and unloading trucks and sorting through donations. It wasn’t the best job, but it was full time and paid rent, and the 20% discount was a boon, since I had been wearing the same three outfits for three months.

On my second or third day there I made a small pilgrimage, walking from my house down through the University District, across portage bay to Lake View Cemetery, most well-known as the resting place of Bruce and Brandon Lee. But I was there to pay homage to someone less famous: the poet Denise Levertov.

My first Christmas in Seattle, three weeks after I moved here, it snowed. I’m from Northern California where it snows less than an inch every 10 years. It was Christmas Eve and I was on the dock unloading trucks and saw the snow falling, shining in the glow of the street lights. The next day I walked to a Chinese restaurant by my house and slipped at least 4 times on the way there and the way back.

After work I would explore different parts of the city; Chinatown and Pioneer Square and that zone between the two along 4th and 3rd avenue where all the homeless folks congregate, some sleeping in doorways, some waiting for the bus, some just waiting, then up through downtown, the buildings getting taller and shinier until reaching the manicured chicness of the retail district and sleek stateliness of South Lake Union, aka Amazonia. Sometimes I’d walk up through the Central District to Capitol Hill and pass the evening at Elliott Bay Books, trying to find something to captivate me, then walk the mile down Pike to downtown and catch the bus home.

Before I moved here I matched with a girl on Tinder. In fact we matched while I was in the air on my way to SeaTac. I got off the plane and exited the terminal and noticed a match notification. She had quoted T.S. Eliot in her profile. We kept up a very sporadic virtual correspondence during my two months of wandering, but by Thanksgiving our conversations had gotten more frequent, deeper, and more intimate. But I wasn’t about to move back home, to a place I’d tried to hard to leave, just to potentially get my heart broken. We didn’t meet until the following April when I went back home to visit and we spent the weekend together. She came to visit me a month later and we got stoned and wandered around the market rode the Great Wheel and saw Infinity War. The second time she came to visit me she stayed for one night and left the next day while I was at work. That was the end of it.

Seattle is a gorgeous and lonely city. The people here are nice but keep to themselves and their immediate family and friends. This is commonly known as the “Seattle freeze” and suits me just fine. I’ve always been good at being alone. I am by nature a solitary person and have always had a hard time opening up to people and making friends and keeping friends. I didn’t start dating until I moved here and am not very good at it. It takes me a while to get comfortable with someone, to really be able to open up to them. All of my relationships had evolved from friendships or acquaintanceships with people I knew from school or work or through other friends. But even I often find myself feeling lonely and bereft.

The last time I visited home was the end of February. Anxiety about COVID-19 was in the air but still hadn’t made its way to Washington State or the U.S., at least not officially. The day I flew back to Seattle was March 2nd, the day the first person in the U.S. died of coronavirus. I debated whether I should go back or stay in NorCal but decided to fly back so as not to jeopardize my job. The plane was at about 50% capacity and I had the entire row to myself. I was furloughed two weeks later. For three months I did nothing but watch Netflix, eat junk food, and collect unemployment. I didn’t write, I hardly even read. Each day around 3pm I would walk around Greenlake. There must have been over a hundred other people, masked, all walking in a counterclockwise loop as the signs requested, not knowing what to do with themselves, going in circles until they end where they began.

The other day, while walking to work, I walked past an opening in the trees along Phinney Ridge that looks out over to Ballard and across Puget Sound. It was 7:30am and the sun was rising. I could see the Olympic mountains on the peninsula rising above the low fog, blushing in the December morning sun.