There is this perfect moment. It doesn’t matter what time of day it is, or what season, or what the weather is like, but it always happens in exactly the same way. I squeeze my roller bag between the rows of airplane seats, trying not to knock into any still-seated passengers. I step out the cabin door on to the jetway. There is always a gap there, a small one sometimes, but still, a gap, and the air leaks in from the outside. If I’ve been away for four weeks or four days, it makes no difference. That moment, when I get my first breath of Seattle, is when I know I am home.

I have lived in Seattle longer than anywhere else. It’s been my home for nearly 20 years. As a child, my family was subject to the whims of my father’s career. As a young adult, I had boundless wanderlust. It took me to Europe, to the Middle East, to India and Pakistan. A divorce brought me to Seattle — I had only one friend here, but desperately seeking change, I made a great leap of faith and I am still here.

He grew up always knowing where home was; there was no question about it.

I can still remember the exact moment in which I realized I was home. I was driving back from hiking in the Cascade Mountains. The sky was that blue of the best summer you can remember, ever. I lived in a shared duplex with a friend, I was always strapped for cash, and I had an uninteresting job working retail. But I was content; even better, I was happy. I wrote to a friend in Germany the next day. “I have found home,” I said. “This place feels like home.”

Pike Place Market, Seattle, WA.

This did not mean I had outgrown my desire to roam, it did not mean I had settled down, it did not mean I had become conventional. It meant that I was in the place where I could unapologetically be the strange cocktail of me and there was no need to explain it. I drove the smooth curves of Highway 2 in an old Toyota under a perfect summer sky, and I knew that I was living in the best possible place to be myself.

My husband is from a small mountain village half a planet away; he grew up and spent his entire life there. In his 20s, when he moved in with his girlfriend “in town,” it was less than 20 miles from his parents’ house. When his older sister moved to “the city,” it was a mere 80 miles away. He grew up always knowing where home was; there was no question about it.

Then I came along to mess things up. When it was clear we would stay together, his assumption was that I would move to his turf. But that was wrong. I had never had a home before, not like I had in Seattle, and I was not going to give it up. I insisted on the impossible. Since he would always know where home was and I had never known home until this city on Puget Sound, he would make the move.

No one was particularly happy about this at first, but when his mother came to visit and liked it, things got better. Cousins showed up, and friends, and we sold the tiny apartment I owned and moved into a house where we could walk to the beach from our front porch. The in-laws came again and again, and as they grew to love Seattle, so did my foreign husband. Now, this is his home too.

When I meet those people who swear by the untethered life, I don’t bother to argue. Instead, I mentally transport myself to that moment on the jetway when I get the first reminder of home. I’ve found mine, and there is no need to explain.