no passports needed for a change

I’m mid-flight, returning to the states, and keep waiting to feel excited about it. Instead I mostly feel unsteady. A feeling that’s been haunting me for a few days now.

I think I know why. For almost a year, my life had one shape to it. Watches, legs, ports, a boat, a crew, a next ocean to cross. It wasn't simple, but it was singular. There was always a next thing, and the next thing was always sailing. Now the next thing is a plane, and then another one, and then a string of places and people I love scattered across a country I haven’t really called home in some time.

Landing in the US feels like the moment this actually becomes finished, more than crossing the finish line did. Out on the water, the race wasn't over until it was over, one leg at a time, and there was always another one coming. Now there isn't. There's just this in-between version of me, holding a passport, headed toward the next chapter instead of the next leg.

I keep looking down at it. Every visa, every stamp, a whole year of ports and border crossings pressed into these pages. And now I'm flying somewhere I won't need it at all. Somewhere I don't have to prove who I am or why I'm allowed in. It's a strange thing to hold, all that evidence of everywhere I've been, on my way to the one place that doesn't ask.

The plan? We have a loose one: visiting my sister-in-law and then my mother with some friend time sprinkled in along the way, and then we head back to boat projects and the full-time cruising lifestyle. All of that while we keep trying to figure out what’s next career-wise, and while Jared and I continue our journey of getting to know each other in a different way - not because we drifted, but because a year like this changes people. We’re both walking back into the same life having grown in directions we haven’t fully mapped for ourselves or each other yet.

Going home always does something strange to my sense of time. The pace slows down fast, and within a day I'm knee-deep in projects with my mother. A dozen somethings around the house or creative projects neither of us can leave alone. The kind of thing I miss when we exist so far apart. I try to build in time with friends too - the old ones, the kind that feel like no time passed at all, in particular. But I’ve learned to hold my plans close when I’m back - to not announce when I’m in town and instead let my time shape up organically - because the people I most want to see are rarely the ones who’d find out first. I worry it costs me people who matter, the ones who aren't in my usual rotation. Instead, I end up protecting pieces of my own time. A favorite restaurant. A specific trail. An hour with no agenda at all. It’s a strange kind of vigilance to carry home with me, guarding my own calendar in the place I grew up.

Yesterday was hard. I had all this anxiety sitting in my chest - on and off all day. The kind that doesn’t have one clear source so much as it has a hundred small ones. Jared was so good about it, giving me space to process, listening without trying to talk me out of existing in my feelings.

The pit still exists.

I’ve been here before, in different versions. Standing at the edge of something I couldn’t know the shape of until I was already inside it. I lived in fight or flight mode for over a year - through race prep and then bracing for storms or whatever racing conditions threw my way. I’ve learned to trust something, or someone, I hadn’t chosen and wasn’t sure I was ready for. It always felt impossible until it wasn’t. Isn’t it funny how the “normal” things are now the ones that give me the most grief? The pit in my stomach? I’m holding onto the proof that I can do the hard things, even if it doesn’t make the pit disappear.

I’ve been running through my own list. What actually helps me find calm. Movement, certain books, certain podcasts, people I trust to call. I’m sure I’ll run through a mix of those as I continue this journey of transition, but no matter how this next phase goes, I know the list exists. That’s something.

I don't have a tidy conclusion for this one. I'm just a person on the edge of a long flight, feeling the weight of something ending and something else not yet having started, and figured I'd say so out loud instead of pretending I had it all sorted before I even got on the plane.

Back to stories of sailing and adventure soon, once I’ve landed and had a minute to catch my breath.