I’m a Washingtonian. I’m obsessed with that identity. But even more than that, I’m from the west side of the state. Seattle is where I say I’m from, but I’m not. You just don’t know where I’m from. But Seattle, Tacoma, Puyallup, Bonney Lake, Buckley, wherever I tell you I’m from, they all feel like pillars building up the concept of me. My heart aches for the evergreen trees and when I drive through Snoqualmie Pass from Spokane, I feel a Band-Aid temporary sticking two halves of my heart together.
In a few years I might not live here and I think that makes me want to cry. When I travel and a stranger asks where I’m from, what shall I say? Nebraska? Kentucky? Utah? None of those are who I am or where I’m from but I might be living there so maybe that’s what I have to say.
I’m obsessed with my rivers. In Enumclaw there’s a small campground with just enough room for three tents full of scouts, but if you walk past the picnic table a few yards, you’ll find a little river. In October it’s chilly, and I’m wearing thick socks in my shoes, but I crouch down and pull a rock out of the water anyway. I imagine all the scouts and small families that have come here and I remember those moments with my sister and dad.
Washington State was trending on TikTok before I had the app. A girl from my summer camp rolled down the window as we drove through The Pass and filmed the mountains of evergreen trees. The mounds of earth were deep green from bottom to top and I know birds and squirrels made their home in those forests. Wind whipped our hair as we drove 70 miles an hour in August on that road, and I think I remember us laughing to a Taylor Swift song.
The wind on that road whips my hair every time my boyfriend and I drive from Spokane to my parents’. I try and film, despite the wet clinging to every bit of oxygen in that half of the state. The videos never turn out, but I post them on my Instagram story anyway. “I love Washington” I might type out in white text, or “western wa >>>”. My high school friends like my story and I add it to my “western wa” highlight bubble.
It doesn’t rain often in Spokane, and when it does, my friends complain. I feel comforted by the droplets, the pours, and puddles. When the winter snow comes, stays, and refuses to melt, my repeat line is “I hate a dry winter.”
I can’t get western Washington out of my head. I have six published poems and four of them are about the Puget Sound. The water I spent my teenage years sailing on. The wind and rain and blue and green that ignites me and gives me identity.
It doesn’t rain often in Spokane, and when it does, my friends complain. I feel comforted by the droplets, the pours, and puddles. When the winter snow comes, stays, and refuses to melt, my repeat line is “I hate a dry winter.”
I can’t get western Washington out of my head. I have six published poems and four of them are about the Puget Sound. The water I spent my teenage years sailing on. The wind and rain and blue and green that ignites me and gives me identity.
When I leave Washington, I’ll be leaving behind my ghost to keep eating granola and blueberries in the upper corner of the PNW. If I grow old and die in another state, that ghost will fly over the sound and the waters of Tacoma. I’ll inhabit the trees of Snoqualmie and the rain in Bonney Lake. I hope my spirit will float down the rivers in Enumclaw and my voice heard in the Buckley wildlife.
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