In less than a week’s time, I will return to New Hampshire.
It’s weird to think about it like a return because, if we’re including college, the Granite State hasn’t been my home in a little over five years. The words “Live Free or Die” might still be on my license plate, but I’ve been in Florida and North Carolina for much longer.
A return home seems to imply there’s still a home to return to, and to a degree that is true. My parents are there, the house I grew up in is still there, many of the places, restaurants, and trails I grew up with and matured on are still there. But something intangible isn’t.
Things change.
The house I grew up in has hardwood floors now instead of carpet, when I left.
My dog isn’t there anymore.
My old friends have scattered to the wind.
The food tastes different. The air smells different. Home, what was home, no longer feels like home.
Why is that?
Change is nature, the nature of life. It’s a hard lesson for someone who, by their nature, looks at the past which is, except for differences of interpretation, fairly fixed. But when you’ve spent so much time away even that imagined sense of familiarity begins to fade.
And you change too.
One year in North Carolina and four on and off in Florida hardly make me a southerner, not that Florida is part of the south. Even your ideas of a southerner change. The drawl and the hospitality are there but not everyone drives a truck and carries a gun. It’s hard to think about leaving a place where, for the first time in your memory, you’ve built a life.
Your life. A life that for a time was entirely your own in a way you’ve never experienced before with all the joy and all the depression that comes from steering that ship alone. It’s as thrilling as it is freeing, or maybe the thrill was the freedom.
Going home can feel like giving up, like failure. It’s a hard thing to fight against but for the same reason that going home no longer feels like home it’s no longer a step backwards.
Because you can’t step backwards.
You can’t go back.
It’s not really going back because what was there, isn’t there anymore.
You’re moving forward, but it looks like your past even if it doesn’t feel like it anymore. You’re moving forward because there’s a better opportunity for you and for the people you love. Even if the move back into the house you once called home feels like a retreat, sometimes even that’s necessary. You need to take a few steps back to get a running jump forward. That’s what this is, you tell yourself.
And then you’re sitting in your apartment that you’ve decorated and slept in and had friends over and cooked your dinners and have lived your life and you watch it all get put into boxes knowing that you can’t take it all with you. You stand there looking at boxes and it feels like you’re looking over the precipice before you take those steps back to leap forward and you wonder if it’s a mistake.
North Carolina may not feel like home but it feels like your life because it was the most real your life has ever felt.
To retreat from that is hard. To pull someone out of it with you is harder. To take that leap with someone, even when it feels so right, can be terrifying.
All of this leaves you sitting with a glass of whisky in front of the boxes you feel too overwhelmed to pack listening to Billy Joel tell you that the King and the Queen can’t go back to green ever again and you wonder if that’s what you’re doing. Are you only stepping forward because you think it will have all the comfort of stepping back even though something deep inside of you tells you that you can’t?
The new opportunity you had revived your passion to the point you felt like crying from happiness.
Now you’re crying because of everything you have to give up to get there.
There’s a price to these things; to chasing dreams and building futures. No one likes to talk about it. It’s so much easier to say “Follow your dreams!” without trying to understand that by choosing one thing you give up so much else. Because that’s life; those choices. They don’t get any easier to make, especially the big ones and especially when what you’re giving up stares you in the face for weeks on end before you leave it, possibly forever.
And just like when you left home for college you tell yourself that it won’t be forever. They tell you that it won’t be forever.
And they don’t tell you that it will never be what it was when you left, for better or for worse.
But you have to make that choice, and in the great game of life sometimes the only way out is through. When you’re standing in a tunnel with a train coming towards you, and the only option you have is to let it hit you and try to stand up afterwards. The price of passion, of forward motion. Take the leap, even if you have to take those steps back. Even if it means moving away from a life you’ve built for the chance of building something better.
It’s a leap I need to take. It’s something I want. It’s all the thrill and terror of opportunity and freedom. It’s the happiness of having had something that it’s so hard to say goodbye to. It’s the sadness of having to say goodbye. It’s the drive to be more than you currently are. It’s that itch of dissatisfaction. It’s the fire of ambition.
It’s a glass raised to thirty-mile views and even longer memories.
To all my friends, colleagues, and adopted family in North Carolina- my glass is raised for you.
Thank you for helping me build my life.