When we first got here, Tay declared that our apartment was like a ship. She meant it as a slight—it’s creaky, shaped weirdly, and full of wood— but I kind of loved thinking of it that way. We’re only blocks from the bay, the calendar islands that populate it, and the open water beyond that, so it’s not a stretch to imagine our little place bobbing next to the lobster boats.

It’s been the first real winter I’ve experienced since moving out of Michigan four years ago, and certainly the first one in a city where I know no one but my sister. When I was here in the summer, I was in love with the state, eating shellfish and stretching long on the beach. But I know how much seasons can change the spirit of a place and I wasn’t sure who I would be here, now, mostly rooted to the floorboards in my corner of the cold city.

I was only in Portland for a few days before heading back to Oregon for two weeks for school, so it wasn’t until late January when I started to find a routine. At the beginning, I was playing my switch a lot, mostly Dave the Diver (thank you Liz) where you catch fish and run a sushi restaurant, and doing very little thinking. I wore the same fuzzy socks almost every day until a hole started to spread across the ball of my foot and didn’t wash my hair enough.

Then, I started painting. I would set up my watercolors on the dining room table each morning, put on music or a video essay, and colorize sketches of shells and beach scenes. I started writing a bit more too, but mostly I let myself play with layers and texture visually instead of having to think of them within the mechanisms of language. Those days were some of my favorite, grinding salt into my coffee cream and watching the cold water blush the page.

Then the last shift, when my internship started on the editorial team for a big five publisher. I’ve been lucky to love the imprint I work for and the people I’m learning from, spending my days steeped in raw-edged manuscripts. It’s made me think of my own writing in new ways, making me want to take bigger swings and turn things over in different lights. My advisor this semester for school also happens to be a poet I deeply admire, and she has pushed me in a way where I can actually feel my writing getting stronger, my poems more realized and my craft more fine-tuned. It’s the first time in my adult life where I’ve had the space to focus on one thing—being a reader and a writer—without the rest of it seeping in and complicating everything. It’s not a sustainable way to live all the time, but it has nurtured me, especially my brain, these past couple months.

Tay and I have spent a great deal of time going to the movies, stomping around the peninsula, and eating our way through the city’s extensive food scene, but mostly we’ve been here, at the dining room table or tucked into the living room. I’ve loved our little ship, watching Ducky run the length of it and almost wiping out chasing after him. And for all its flaws (the bathroom door doesn’t close, the toilet wobbles, the kitchen is not equipped to be cooked in every night, etc.) it has provided me a little oasis, not quite underground, but away from sight, to quietly bloom in.

After I got back from my residency in Oregon, Taylor and I had a magical summer in the North Shore of Massachusetts, falling into the rhythm of living together while I got used to being in school again. We spent a lot of time in Maine, tumbling in the waves at Footbridge Beach and eating clam chowder and lobster rolls at every roadside hut I could convince her to stop at. Other days we drove down the Cape and watched the seals pop their heads out of the surf in Truro, or up to Portsmouth, sifting through the racks at Drift Collective. All this to say, summer was beautiful, and I was spoiled with the sheer volume of time I spent by the ocean, so when we left for North Carolina, I wasn’t exactly in need of a vacation.

When Tay and I had decided to spend a month in the Outer Banks, my only understanding of it came from the tv show (a guilty but sacred pleasure in this house) which wasn’t filmed there or really representative of the true place in any way, so we didn’t have any real expectations besides wanting to lay on the beach and eat some good food. We rented a ranch in Southern Shores, a tiny section of the island where homes sit shaded under the live oaks that cover the thin strip of land between beaches. The fat, spindly branches stretch out to meet you through the whole neighborhood, pointing you toward the marsh to feed strawberries to the yellow bellied sliders sunning on the grass, or around the corner to climb up the dunes, past the ghost crabs, and down to the water.

As anyone reading this probably knows, I’ve always been obsessed with the ocean and the moon. When I was a kid, growing up on Lake Huron and pirating new episodes of H2O on my mom’s laptop, I used to drag my sisters down to the dock at midnight on a full moon to watch me slip underwater and bear witness to the magic when I sprouted a tail. Though I’ve had to settle for a tiny mermaid tattoo, the sea and the sky still pull me, and I find myself writing about them in my poems, my journals, and my dreams. In Southern Shores, I felt held by both all of the time.

Our house had a screened in front porch that quickly became Ducky’s favorite spot, so every morning we would start our day out there, listening to the waves and the birds together. Some days Tay and I would ride bikes down the path to Duck (the town, not my cat) to stop for coffee or pick up paper-wrapped mahi from the fish market, and others we would lay around the living room until it was time to pack a beach bag and walk down the block. (Almost) every night I drank a landshark with lime and cooked something fresh, while Taylor played music and the salt spilled in through the open windows. I got up at dawn to go shelling, watched surfers eat shit on the swells, listened to Norman Fucking Rockwell on the car ferry to Ocracoke, dug up mole crabs (and screamed when they wriggled in my hands), braided coquinas in my hair, and slept with sand in my sheets. Friends visited—first Lizzie, then Erin and Alex— and I showed them how to hunt for bay scallops and lightning whelks, pulling up the tide tables over dinner at Blue Moon. During our last week, Taylor and I rode around Carova spotting wild horses, and a man who worked on the beach gave us both nuggets of fulgurite he had found. Each day felt like that, a little bit of lightning I could hold in my hands.

We went so many places while living in Mass, but at the end of each day we tucked into our apartment that could have been in any neighborhood in any city. In the Outer Banks, I became a part of the place, and it became a part of me.

Taylor’s next assignment is still up in the air right now, so though we’re headed off again in January, we don’t know where to yet—potentially Manhattan, Arizona, or Maine. Wherever we go, I know I will be able to try on a new version of myself like a coat, seeing what I write and what I want when I’m wearing it. But when I’m ready to shed the layers and just sit in my own skin, I’ll head back to North Carolina.

The following June, I returned to work at camp for one final summer, my copy of the book in tow. I had been taking books of poetry out onto the porch to dissect during rest hour since my first season there, when I was 19 and a little greener. It felt natural to dig into language under those fat old trees, with the din of the girls in the cabin bouncing behind me, and that porch crust of bug spray and pine resin stuck to my feet.

During that last summer, at 23, I needed that book, needed those poems. I was in the driver’s seat of a relationship that was breaking both our hearts and trying to get out of doing the thing I had just spent four and a half years getting a degree in, drowning in fear and memory.

Now I’m out here in Oregon, and Dorianne is my teacher. So many of my favorite poets, ones whose words I’ve clung to and slurped up and burned into myself, are my teachers. Here, I wake up when the sun rises. I walk to get a coffee and a cardamom bun. I smell the mountains, and then I shuffle into the room where I learn about poems. How to write them and how to taste them.

Tonight I joked on the phone to Lizzie that during these craft talks, I feel like a white suburban mom at the church where you can wear jeans, throwing her hands up, head back, eyes closed. I keep choking up during lectures the same way I used to during my mythology class in undergrad, when I wrote in my notes that it felt like I was discovering religion.

Writing has always made me hungry. I’d finish cobbling together a piece just to read it over and over again until I could only think of writing the next one, which wouldn’t come for months. I used it when I needed it to get the thing out of me, but I couldn’t nourish it. Not with a job that kept me always moving, not with a frenzied heart, not with a drained account, not with a panic for the appetite itself.

Here, in the violet quiet of the Willamette Valley, I’m finally feeding.

working on my mfa means I will be writing seriously and constantly over the next two years, so I wanted to have an outlet that wasn’t really polished or particularly good writing, where I could document the places I’m traveling to, the food I’m eating, the things I’m feeling, etc.—something that keeps me writing for fun that isn’t just a rant on my close friends’ story. I can’t say how long this will last or how frequent it will be (given my whims), but I guess we will find out as we go! tay and I have quite a few places on the docket for the upcoming months that I’m excited to write about and write from, but given that I just got back from three weeks in greece, I’ll start there.

the first time I went to greece, I was 17. it was my first time leaving the country (ontario doesn't count) and it felt like the beginning of what I imagined my real life to look like. it was unseasonably hot, even for the mediterranean in july, and I was moved to near-religious fervor listening to lana del rey, sweating under orange trees, and planting my feet in ancient dust. the trip started in rome and meandered south until we piled onto a ferry in bari, sailing through the night to patras. it was 2015, when the migrant crisis was at its peak and the greek banks were collapsing. the hallways of the ship were lined with families in sleeping bags, there were protests outside of our hotel in athens each night, and shopowners offered steep discounts for paying in cash because they couldn’t withdraw from their accounts. I drank in the world and felt full of all of it, the salted tomatoes and the noise.

I’ve been to eight other countries since then, and still, I was dizzied with wonder the moment I landed back in greece. we drove through the green storm of corfu, and bits of poems rolled around my mouth like olive pits. the full moon rose in santorini, and the winds whipped in with african sand like a prophecy from the joni mitchell song I had on repeat. I sat at satari with spinach pie and cold espresso, writing postcards of figs and fish. on our boat day, we snorkeled out to the rocky outcrops of santa maria beach and watched the sea bream churn through weeds. most of my time in naxos was spent by the water, but on the last full day we took a bus into the villages, and it stopped at the ruins of a temple for demeter. I had just finished rachel lyon’s stunning new book that reimagines the myth, fruit of the dead, and standing in the garden of the ruins, I could taste the pomegranates, could feel myself pulled down like persephone.

(on the other side of things, my 65-pound suitcase made me want to end my life on multiple occasions, I got sick from a club and had to waste two days in bed, and the airport in naxos nearly sent me into psychosis, but I digress.)

I can’t quite synthesize the versions of myself that have bloomed or starved here in cincinnati over the last few years. I returned to greece carrying all those skins, and she stepped me out of them. she draped them in the kumquat trees to dry and crumble down to peat. she sent me back tender and new.

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