10:30pm, August 20
On my second-to-last night in my hometown I walk up to the grounds of my old elementary school right after sunset. A wooden fence stretches for a good quarter mile against the soccer fields; the sky is all pinks and oranges set against blues, and it looks like a memory. For someone who always said this town isn’t where I feel most at home, there’s a loss aching in the spaces between my ribs. It’s weird: I left this town once before, six years ago, leaping carelessly over the boundary between high school naïveté and college naïveté. Then I came back, and now, on the precipice of real adulthood, leaving is different. That thought repeats in my head as I walk: It’s different, it’s different, it’s different. There is the barest sliver of the moon out to play in the twilight.
I didn’t think leaving would be so weird, but it is. And I know a lot about weird things. When I was 19 I figured out I could process my feelings through my writing, and I could put it on the internet, and I could help you feel like you’re not alone (because you’re not). And so over the last five years I’ve written about weirdness: the space between one amazing summer, one horrible one, and one that was grayscale. Being obsessed with horse racing (and asking all of you to pardon that). Feeling hollow and rudderless after graduation. Feeling the constant anxiety of the pandemic. Being happy I’ve spent these months able to hear my family’s footsteps throughout the house. And now…I’m writing about all that weirdness ending.
For two years between graduation and now, I reflected on the meaning of being stuck, constantly searching for something better, feeling like others had secrets I needed to possess too, but couldn’t yet. I wrote about the hunger for the city that licks its way up my body as I move through the Lower East Side at night. I wrote about sadness. I wrote about missing my friends, feeling isolated from them, and the desperation of needing to belong to somewhere new. I wrote about not feeling like I belonged in my hometown after it chewed me up and spat me out when I was 19. And now… now it’s my second-to-last night in this town and I am sad to leave.
Everything came together in one month this year, in the middle of a pandemic: journalism school, an apartment, and more, all good things I’ve been searching for. My future spliced itself together so fast it could’ve given me whiplash, but it didn’t. It feels like I have moved a mountain, slowly, in the time I felt like I was stuck. Remember this: You are moving a mountain, very slowly. You are putting yourself together even if you don’t realize it. You are.
The grounds of my old elementary school are ghostly silent. I’ve passed the school so many times in the last five months since quarantine began and the only thing left to do was take walks. There has always been a family in the fields or kids on the swings. Once, a boy sat for a long time under the big orange plastic fish I remember playing on when I was small. People are usually biking up and down the side parking lot. Tonight it is empty. All the symbolism in the world couldn’t have prepared me for that.
The fact of it all is, despite all the displacement, despite the anxiety, despite feeling rudderless, I will miss this town and all of its reminders. I’ve spent every summer here that I can remember. I lifeguarded here and built my identity around that red suit. I crashed and burned in this town during the summer of 2015, and felt alright by the summer of 2016, but I can still hear echoes of my own pain if I listen hard enough. It is a strange and lovely thing, to see ghosts everywhere. It’s even lovelier to be able to wave to them and move on.
I returned to this town two years ago feeling hollow, and leave now feeling mended, like I am whole again, and it’s a happy accident but it’s also not. I’ve worked hard in the last two years. I arrived home after graduation unable to admit that my mental health was a disaster. I leave with a therapist who is essential to my wellbeing and the distinct, exhilarating ability to talk about my feelings, to live with my anxiety. I arrived home dreading being here again, feeling like I somehow failed because I didn’t live up to my college self’s expectations. I leave knowing that’s not true–It just took me a little longer than I thought it would. I came home two years ago and took twilight summer walks to feel my feelings, to process them. I leave doing the exact same thing. When I’m in the city, I will miss the sounds of the cicadas.
I will miss this town because it allowed me to put myself back together, but I am so excited to leave. I have dreamt of this day for a decade, at least. When I arrived home from Hopkins I had a very vague idea of what I wanted to do. Reporting–but where? About what? For whom? Two years later I can answer those questions–and I’m going to school to make sure I can be a reporter who serves communities. I learned so much from the jobs I had while living at home, and now, at school, with my classmates, I’m back in a place where everyone thinks and breathes journalism like me. It’s like being back in the News-Letter office, but even better, because I can build on everything the N-L taught me. Going to grad school is like coming home. And speaking of coming home—now I have a new place to call my own. It sounds silly, but for two years I’ve missed the way the fake wood of my college apartment felt beneath my feet. I am so excited to have new wood floors.
When I arrived home from Hopkins, I also had a very vague idea of what I wanted my life to look like, who I wanted to be in it, who I wanted to be throughout it. I have answers for all of those questions now, too. They have evolved and changed and the answers I have now might not be permanent, but I am content with them. They are good for me. I know who I am and love who I am with.
To everyone and everything who has helped me learn how to be me again over the last two years: thank you. It’s a little heartbreaking to leave this town, but it would be more heartbreaking to not. With every ending there is a beginning.
I take a final look at the fading slice of moon and the pink clouds and turn my back on my old elementary school. I lope down the big hill that begins after the last soccer field ends and turn up the music in my headphones. The air is so heavy and sweet I can feel individual molecules hanging around me. Giant leaves hang from the low trees planted up the entire path heading home. There is an ache between my ribs, a swelling in my chest, and it’s the ache of both leaving a home and heading toward a new one.
Home is a place, and it’s more than that. It’s this walk that I’ve walked so many times before and never tire of. It’s the tendrils of the neighbor’s flowers brushing against you as you walk past; it’s the crickets filling the still air; it’s the nearly-forgotten half-love you used to feel for someone who did not deserve it, which comes back to you when you look out over the harbor; it’s your family, if you’re lucky, like I am. It’s even all the nights you spent curled up with your anxiety and sadness, learning about them. It’s the childhood bedroom where you learned to feel okay again after graduating from college made you feel like you jumped off a plane without a parachute. It’s the people who helped you feel good, too. It’s the colors of the sky; it’s everything good that is to come. When I’m in the city, I will miss the sounds of the cicadas.
