A Goodbye Letter to Seattle

Dear Seattle,

I will miss your emerald skyline, your parks that make the city feel like a giant playground. I will miss your ubiquitous water that is like liquid Prozac on my nerves. I will miss Rainier keeping a distant but studious eye over you and your soaring housing prices.

I will miss trying to order a Bitchwich at Biscuit Bitch with a straight face, fancy brunch at Portage Bay, and I will also miss scrounging the inner linings of my car for spare change to buy a Dicks Burger.

I will miss your magical summer evenings: splashing in the International Fountain with my boys and random nude adults on quaaludes, and bike rides along the Burke-Gilman trail - can we make it to Lake Washington tonight, kids?

I will miss ALL the salmon. Fresh salmon lofted between fishmongers at Pike Place Market, salmon grilled on cedar planks, salmon murals, salmon-shaped slides on your playgrounds. I will miss going to Ballard Locks with my Mexican father-in-law and trying to explain that no, you cannot just grab the salmon off the ladders and take them home to grill because they are "protected" - and that word getting completely lost in translation.

I will miss M's games and guessing if the giant roof will be open or closed at Safeco during the rainy drizzle. I will miss having to explain to my kid why people refer to the Downtown Biospheres as "Bezos Balls."

I will miss worrying that my pink-haired techy millennial neighbors will starve if UberEats ever goes under. And I will miss other neighbors with big houses who leave their Christmas lights up through the winter because the darkness at 4PM on a January afternoon can feel unbearable. I will miss giggling at the irony of your wealthy all-white neighborhoods dotted with Black Lives Matters signs, but I will also miss how those same neighbors cradled and reaffirmed our mixed family post-election.

I might even miss the jaw-dropping, white-knuckled bus ride that is the E-line a little bit.

No. No, I won't.

But most of all, I will miss you, Green Lake. Beautiful Green Lake, you have been the backdrop to my boys' childhoods. We have swung in your trees, swam in your water, boated to the epic and mysterious Duck Island. We have circled your path while trying to make sense of our own lives and the world we live in. And we always leave your shores feeling a little bit better.