When I step outside it seems too warm, too sunny, and I get a slightly unsettled feeling as I start out on my run because this warmth and this sun are terribly unusual for this time of year. I live near a popular bike path, so it is easy to run without having to worry about cars and lights and things that might force me to focus on my personal safety. So I am able to focus on my breath, on the speed and sound of each breath, and I run until my asthma says my lungs have had enough of all this running on this particular day.

I run, simply, because I need my blood and my body to move in a way that it doesn’t move when I am standing still—because I am not good at this, not good at being still, not good at staying in one place too long. I have been here in Seattle—a city that I love dearly—for some 10 years now, and I have lived in this house that I own for at least seven of those 10 years. Save for growing up in Chicago, I have never lived in any city for more than five years, and I have a penchant for moving apartments every one to two years. But I bought a place, bought this place, and for the past seven years it has been “basecamp”—only I have never ventured off on a long-enough journey and returned home to snuggle back into my comfortable bed.

I had, for many years, moved every year or so because I could not stay, could not plant roots, could not seem to attach myself to much of anything. I am still this way, still mostly unattached, still mostly un-attachable. I don’t know how to stay, don’t know how to … I just don’t know how to stay. I move—though the more accurate word might be “leave”—because it cleanses my life, rids me of possessions, detaches me of things.

Every year at this time—this time being October slash November—I get the urge to leave my life. Part of me wants to fall asleep and wake up in another country with another identity. Another part of me wants to wander somewhere, anywhere, so long as I was am always moving forward, never staying anywhere long enough to learn the names of streets well enough that I could draw a map of how to get from Point A to Point B. Another part of me wants to go somewhere, briefly, walk the streets and discover a city’s hum, stumble across bars with empty stools and beers on tap.

This year I do it. I feed that urge, feed that wanderlust, and go somewhere, briefly, and do all of the things I want to do: walk, discover and stumble. And that delightful feeling I get when I engage in my life—that feeling that soaks into my skin with each step and each breath—goes deep. And when I return home, return to “basecamp,” I know that I’m about to shake up my life.

I have been avoiding a specific city for years, probably a good 12 years to be more accurate, because the simple mention of this city has stirred something inside my atrium, stirred the blood rushing through my arteries. It is a bit like a low-level hum that is always there, almost undetectable with all the white noise of my daily life. When I stop, though, when I stop and watch the leaves rustle, watch the rain fall, listen to the sound of water crashing onto shore, I can hear that low-level hum and the power of its echo inside my ears.

Later in the day—after my run, when it is mid-afternoon—the light changes and becomes a darker version of gray. The temperature cools and by the time I walk through my front door, that unsettled feeling I started my run with seems to have numbed a little, but I know it will return, and I know it will return with an edgier intensity.

It is time, I know—soon, really—to scratch the itch and move my body and my blood, to start the next geographical journey. But first I need to explore here more. I need to wander and discover and stumble across the streets of Seattle—and I have been doing this for days now, and each time I return home, I get that unsettled feeling, only this time it lingers, and has yet to leave, yet to turn gray, yet to cool, yet to numb.