adrift

Watching some show or other with Pete, I feel my mind drifting. Without meaning to, my eyes close and the light changes. I am surrounded by the dim blue glow of arctic winter, and one of the trails I know so well runs out ahead of my mind’s eye like a ribbon through the trees. The charlie-brown spruce out across the frozen swamp are heavy with frost. The sun is invisible in the haze of ice-fog. I glide through a long corner and into the relative darkness of a stand of birch and aspen on a small rise. I open my eyes and find myself back in Iowa with no idea what has transpired on the television in the last minutes. I close my eyes again, hoping for more trail, stomach sinking with a deep sense of homesickness that I cannot shake off.

I wrote a few years ago, here, about my sense of place in Alaska despite its relative lack of the deep sense of community I’d become accustomed to in the years before I landed there, as well as my fears about leaving that place for the cornfields and towns of the midwest for a time. I’m finding, two years in, that my fears have been realized. I continue to feel disconnected and adrift here, even in the small pockets of forest and trail I’ve found to wander, the friends I’ve found to walk with for a piece.

I have been back north twice since we left in a U-Haul two years ago, and both times I returned in a deep funk that took months to shake, my restlessness and discontent here put in sharp focus by the trips back. Both times, I have thought better of going back and triggering the feelings again. But now I am considering a longer foray into the north, for a good chunk of the fall. So many things need to slide into place for this to happen, but if they do the question will remain: Should I go? Here, especially since moving to this smaller town, I’m whiling away my days in fits and starts. But leaving Peter for so many weeks gives me pause.

Ultimately, the thing I don’t know is if a long trip will be salt in the wound or a balm for it. Will coming back south (possibly to graduate school, and so a more focused trajectory) be better for having been in a place I love for a time, or will it prove too much of a temptation to wallow? Or (and this, I fear too) will the coke-bottle glasses grown rosier and rosier over the last two years be ripped away and leave me without these unbidden interludes and frank, grasped hope that have helped me power through being here (gracelessly) so far? There is no way to know, but I don’t feel a peace about either way. I am not moored here, with my mind there. Nor there, with my body here. But I’m not sure where that leaves me, or which direction I should head.

In the next few days, I’ll be getting a graduate decision letter in the mail. I’ll be figuring out if the truck can make the trip. I’ll be negotiating and calculating the handful of bits and pieces that need to fall into place to make a trip even feasible. But the question of should remains over that of could, because regardless of what I tell myself about “things falling into place” I can always jam them there if it comes to that, if going really is the best thing for now.