Hubby is home!

The Witching Hour, Beneath a Gibbous Moon

He is home. The salt-streaked wind of his absence no longer howls through the hollows of my heart. I can breathe again, a sigh of relief that unfurls like a raven’s wing against the velvet night. The old house creaks its welcome, the floorboards whispering secrets as his sea-worn boots tread the familiar path to our hearth. His eyes, still haunted by the horizon, carry tales of tempests and twilight shores, but he is here, and the world feels anchored once more.

If I were not a chummer, bound to the land by the weight of my own shadowed soul, I would have sailed with him. I would have stood at the bow, my hair a tangle of storm and starlight, chasing the siren call of distant ports. His voyage wove through towns that beckon to me like half-remembered dreams, their streets lined with the ghosts of forgotten things. He spoke of pit stops in places where time seems to pool like spilled ink—towns brimming with antique shops, those sacred vaults of memory where the past clings to tarnished silver and moth-eaten lace. My heart aches for such places, my home away from home, where every cracked mirror and dusty tome holds a story waiting to be exhumed.

I’ve always been drawn to the raucous pulse of Duval Street in Key West, its neon-lit revelry a fever dream of laughter and clinking glasses. Bourbon Street in New Orleans, too, has its own dark magic, a cacophony of jazz and sin where the air is thick with the scent of crawfish and old regrets. Those streets are alive, thrumming with the heartbeat of the present, their bars and restaurants spilling light and noise into the night. They are places to lose oneself, to drown in the moment and emerge baptized in sweat and starlight.

But Astoria, Oregon—oh, Astoria is different. It is a whisper, a sigh, a town where the fog curls like a lover’s hand around the eaves of Victorian houses. Its main strip, Commercial Street, is a cathedral of relics, where antique stores stand shoulder to shoulder, their windows gleaming with the soft, sepulchral glow of forgotten treasures. Unlike the hedonistic sprawl of Duval or Bourbon, Astoria’s heart is quieter, more introspective. Each shop is a mausoleum of memory, filled with chipped porcelain dolls, pocket watches frozen at forgotten hours, and oil paintings of stern-faced ancestors whose eyes follow you through the dust-moted air. To walk those streets is to step into a liminal space, where the veil between past and present grows thin, and every object hums with the weight of its own story.

I can imagine myself there, my fingers trailing over the cracked spines of leather-bound books, my reflection distorted in the warped glass of an ancient mirror. Astoria feels like a place where I could belong, a town that understands the beauty of decay, the poetry of things left behind. It is not the frenetic energy of a party but the slow, deliberate dance of time eroding all things. I envy him his visits.

For now, I am content to sit by the fire, his hand in mine, the scent of brine and adventure still clinging to his coat. The house is whole again, its shadows softer, its silence less accusatory. But as I write these words, my mind drifts to Astoria, to its fog-wreathed streets and the treasures that await me there. One day, I will walk that main strip, a pilgrim in a temple of relics, and I will find something—a locket, a letter, a fragment of someone else’s life—that speaks to the chummer in me, the one who stays behind but dreams of voyages yet to come.

Until then, I will keep my diaries, my Gothic Dust Diaries, and let the ink preserve these fleeting moments of longing and relief. The moon wanes, the fire dies, and he is home. For now, that is enough.