Sometime around 2007 during a trip to Maine, I was walking in Bar Harbor when I turned to my partner and said, “I love it here so much. I’m going to die here.”
And then I stepped off the curb.
A bus came toward me, and he grabbed me back and said, “Not today.”
It probably should have been a sign to be a little more careful with my declarations, but that wasn’t what stayed with me. What stayed with me was how quickly I said it — how certain I felt about a place I had only just begun to know.
That trip was one of those rare ones where everything just lands right. We wandered through the town, spent long stretches in the park, and found our way onto the water whenever we could. There was kayaking and bird watching and a lot of quiet just taking it all in. And the sailboats — I still remember them so clearly. The kind with beautiful teak decks, polished and warm in the sun, the kind you don’t just look at, you sort of daydream about.
There was a rhythm to it all that felt different from anywhere else. Slower, but not sleepy. Quiet, but not empty. It felt grounded in a way I couldn’t really explain at the time.
I just knew I loved it.
I think part of what made that trip unforgettable was him.
Some relationships burn hot and leave wreckage behind. Ours never felt like that.
He felt familiar to me from the beginning. Easy in the way certain people are when you don’t have to explain yourself constantly. We could spend hours together without needing to fill every silence.
Looking back now, I can’t untangle my memory of Maine from my memory of him.
The coastline. The salt air. The long quiet stretches in Acadia. The sailboats cutting across the water. He exists inside all of it.
We both knew that trip was the autumn of our relationship. In a way, our goodbye.
Not explosive. Not cruel. Just quietly nearing its end in the way some relationships do when two people can feel the shape of what’s coming before either of them says it out loud.
There was sadness in it, though I don’t think I fully understood that at the time.
But there was tenderness too.
A kind of gratitude for having known each other in the first place.
Maybe that’s part of why the memories feel so intact now. Nothing had hardened yet. Nothing had turned bitter.
We were simply there together — in a place that would stay with me forever — at the exact moment one chapter of my life was beginning to close, and another was quietly opening.
I couldn’t have explained then why Maine felt so familiar to me. Why it felt less like discovery and more like recognition.
Years later, I would learn that my family had already been there.
As I started digging into my genealogy, everything began to point back to Maine. Names, places, lines that had been there long before I ever set foot on that sidewalk in Bar Harbor. I had been focused on building my tree forward, collecting documents and tracing lines carefully, but suddenly there it was — this place I had felt drawn to without understanding why.
Somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like a place I discovered and started feeling like something I returned to.
By then, he was gone…lost to those who loved him in tragic circumstances. Even now, his death feels too harsh against the softness of those memories.
And maybe that’s part of why the trip still lives inside me so vividly — because it became two things at once.
The beginning of my love affair with Maine. And one of the last untouched places where he still exists completely alive in my memory.
When I think about that trip now, I feel happiness and grief almost simultaneously. They arrive together.
The older I get, the more I understand that some places become emotional landmarks in our lives. Not because of geography alone, but because of who we were there. Who we loved there. Who we became there.
I think about that moment in Bar Harbor sometimes. Not the bus — although I probably should — but what I said just before it.
I didn’t know anything about my connection to Maine then. I didn’t know the names or the towns or the many, many stories that tied me to it. I just knew how I felt when I was there.
And maybe that’s the part that matters.
Sometimes you recognize something before you understand it.