Time became different after we left Forks.
Not faster or slower — just softer.As if the edges of our days blurred into one another, losing their urgency.Humans mark their lives by milestones: graduations, weddings, birthdays, funerals.
But for us, the years stretched into long ribbons of quiet continuity.
We moved often.Not out of fear — not at first — but out of necessity.The world was changing quicker than it ever had before.And for people like us, change wasn't an inconvenience.It was a threat.
Our first stop was northern Montana.A small town near the mountains, where people still left their doors unlocked and believed strangers were simply friends they hadn't met yet.
We lived there for six years.
I went to school — again — though I looked different now. Older.More myself.
It was the first place where I learned how to pretend.Pretend to struggle in math.Pretend to be surprised by snowstorms.Pretend to eat cafeteria food I discreetly threw away.
Jacob worked at a mechanic shop for a while, and though he didn't need the money, he liked the normalcy.Humans admired his easy smile and strong hands.He admired their effortless humanity.
Edward and Bella kept to themselves, avoiding attention.Alice opened a tiny boutique, which closed abruptly the day a woman asked why she "never seemed to age at all."
We left that night.
Our next home lasted only four years.Technology was beginning to shift —security cameras, digital school records, online photos —proof of every face and every year.
"People forget what they see," Edward once told me."But cameras don't."
That frightened Bella more than any enemy ever had.
So we moved again.
We lived in the Pacific Northwest for a time, hidden among misty forests where people minded their own business.It was there that I realized something important:immortality wasn't a stillness.
It was motion.Endless, unbroken motion.
Each time we arrived in a new town, Esme redecorated with quiet enthusiasm, trying to make unfamiliar walls feel like home.Carlisle worked as a doctor under different names, saving lives with the same steady kindness he'd always carried.Emmett and Rosalie fought like always, loved like always, left their mark on every place we stayed.
It was comforting —this rhythm, this constancy.
And yet, sometimes, I wondered what it would be like to live a life with roots.To grow in one place and grow old in it.To have teachers who remembered my name from childhood.To walk into a shop where the owner knew my favorite color.To be someone's history.
But that wasn't what I was made for.
Decade by decade, the world brightened —lights, cameras, screens, satellites.The kind of exposure that made anonymity almost impossible.
Bella once said,"Being invisible used to mean hiding.Now it means running faster than the world can catch up."
By the time I looked twenty-three — the age I would stay forever — we were running more than we were living.
It was in Canada, somewhere between Vancouver and the Yukon, when Carlisle found him —a newly turned vampire, terrified and starving, huddled in a collapsed shed.
His name was Leo.He was only nineteen when someone bit him and left him.He didn't know why.He didn't even know what he had become.
I watched Carlisle kneel beside him with gentle hands, offering help with the same compassion he'd shown me when I was a child.
Leo became part of us — slowly, cautiously — but he wasn't the last.Across the decades, we found others.Not many.But enough that our family grew in ways I never expected.
Helping them gave us purpose.Saving them gave us direction.But taking them in also made us more visible.
Rosalie said, one night as the aurora glowed faintly above us,"We're getting too big, too bright.Someone will notice."
She didn't mean humans.
I knew who she meant.We all did.But no one said their name.
Our final years before Alaska were spent in the Rocky Mountains, in a town too small for a Starbucks and too cold for many tourists.
There, I felt something shift inside me.
It started with tiny things —the ability to sense someone's emotions before touching them,memories flickering in my mind that weren't mine,the strange way the world felt louder, clearer, closer.
I told Jacob first.He listened with quiet intensity, one hand warm on my shoulder.
"You're not dangerous," he said."You're evolving."
But evolving into what, I didn't know.
Edward noticed the change next.Bella after him.
Alice tried to see my future, but her visions slipped away like snow through open fingers.
"It's not that I can't see you," she said."It's that something is changing too fast for me to follow."
I wasn't afraid.Not yet.But the uncertainty threaded itself through my days like a whisper I couldn't quite catch.
We left the Rockies not because of danger,but because the world had become too modern, too watched, too aware.
Our names were scattered online in old photos we hadn't realized were taken.People began comparing the past and present a little too closely.
It was time. Again.
That's how Alaska came into the conversation.Not as an escape —but as a place where the world might finally be quiet enough for us to breathe.
We packed our lives one more time.One more town, one more identity, one more story abandoned half-finished.
I didn't cry.Immortals rarely do.
But I did look back —at every school, every forest, every fleeting friendship, every sunrise that marked a new beginning instead of an end.
The decades behind us were not wasted.They were lived.
Messy, wandering, restless.But lived.
And somewhere beyond those years of uncertainty waited the cold, silent north —the last place on earth where we might still find peace.
Or something like it.