About an hour outside of Boston, my bus from New York pulled off the pike for a rest stop. I got out to stretch and resolutely not go into the gas station and buy any snacks (hell, I still had a sodium hangover from the Cheetos we’d eaten the night before).
As soon as
I hit the air, I knew I was in Massachusetts.
I could smell it.
The less
sentimental among us would point out that what I was smelling was humidity and
the green that comes with late spring on the East Coast. Not surprisingly, I have very little time for
less sentimental people.
Because to
me, it smelled like Massachusetts. And
it smelled like home.
I was
watching Garden State recently, which
has taken on all sorts of new significance now that I’m actually out there
exploring my own personal infinite abyss, and something struck me about Zach
Braff’s ruminations about the idea of home.
It’s slipperier than you think when you’re a kid, like most of the
essential, simple, and fundamental things you have to learn how to make sense
of (love, grief, family, disappointment, insurance), and I found an odd period
in my mid-twenties when I came to realize that my parents’ house was no longer
properly home. Instead, after some
growing pains, my studio in Boston had become home, which I now gauge to be the
place in which you miss the fewest
things, people, or other places. It’s
the place where you lack the least.
I spent the
first part of spring break this spring in Illinois with my best friend; in
spite of Boston’s being home, I still consider myself to be “from”
Illinois. (Negotiating the language of
origin, location, and allegiance is a bitch in this decade of my life.) As a result, I’d had to go back to Boulder to
hysterically research and write the papers I’d been putting off for weeks.
On Easter
Sunday, I talked with the various members of my family on the phone, most of
whom were in Brookline with my aunt.
And that
afternoon, I found myself very, very lacking.
In fact, the lack was pretty much incapacitating.
I lacked
that perfect, springtime Boston humidity, where it’s always a little too warm
inside until you get fans going and even then you feel faintly sticky. I lacked the obscene amount of food, some of
which would be forcibly shoved into Tupperware for my lunch the following
week. I lacked the white wine buzz that
inevitably comes from a quorum of my family members gathering in one place, and
I lacked wheedling a sober family member (usually my dad) to borrow a car and
drive me back to my apartment, where I’d mosey the last few steps from the curb
into my building for a relaxing afternoon of silence after the familial white
noise of people who generally talk too loud (myself included). I lacked the friends to call for a leftovers potluck and a post-family vent.
I lacked my
family, my friends, and my home, and I cried like a child for hours.
So much for
my research.
If you had
asked me five years ago what would be the top reasons I would move to a
particular place, I’d instantaneously answer “job.” A little further down the list might be
“guy,” although I wouldn’t admit it, even to myself, without extreme
embarrassment. I had thought of these things as being the constant, and the
location was just window dressing. The
dream job anywhere is still the dream job, right?
That,
however, was a hypothetical five years ago.
This currently is my life. And so
help me God, I want desperately to live it in Boston.
I, along
with most of the people who know me, had thought that I would move west to
Boulder and never look back. Of all the
places I would be ecstatically happy, Boulder seemed a likely candidate: fresh
powder to ski on, creeks to swim in, and open spaces to bike across, gasping
the thin air and trying not to pass out.
In theory, the foothills would be alive with the sound of my happiness.
In reality,
not so much.
That
afternoon, standing within earshot of the Pike and waiting to get back on the
bus, I realized something for which I have been grateful ever since: I know
what I’m willing to do to go home, because I know that the dream job will
probably mean precisely jack shit if I don’t have my people there to toast it
with.
Boston, and
my people in it, are my priority. And in
the ongoing existential crises of my twenties, a loud and ringing priority is a
miraculous thing. It is also a
miraculous thing, as a lifelong type-A, to finally understand that being happy,
that not lacking, is in most cases a much, much better way to be than
mercenarily successful.
Later that
week in Boston, perched on one of my aunt’s stools in the kitchen, I heard a
cardinal’s chirp from the trees outside, and it made my heart ache. I’ve always considered them personal good
luck charms, little signs of good from the universe. I also realized in that moment that I hadn’t
heard or seen a cardinal since moving West.
Technically, the northern cardinal inhabits a southeastern swath of
Colorado, but I’m not so big on technicalities, especially when I feel like
somebody’s trying to tell me something.
That
something runs along the lines of head
east.
And so, another nine months, and
I will be headed back to cardinal country.
