Circles and Squares

 

“Where are your people?”

           

Two years, sixteen states under my Subaru, and one graduate degree later, those four words still haunt me.

When my oldest sister uttered them, they were the final push I needed to accept an offer from a graduate program in Colorado.  And I really did believe I was right: I thought that my proverbial people, the post-graduate equivalent of my collegiate pack, were more likely to be in Boulder than anywhere else on earth.  I headed west convinced that, not counting brief visits, I would never really come back.

To put it simply, I was wrong.

My dad told me a couple of months ago that there is no such thing as the Right Decision: the single option that is correct, and if you choose it, all will be well, and if you don’t, God help you.  He said that you make the best decision you can, based on the best information you have at any given time.  Whatever comes after doesn’t change the fact that you did the best you could with what you had.

There are so many things I couldn’t have known about graduate school.  In general, there really is no predicting cohort chemistry or departmental drama.  Specifically, I could not have known that my year of graduate students would be filled by crazy people (I guess I have to include myself in that), nor could I have known how dysfunctional our department was.  A friend back in Boston told me at the end of my first year that graduate school was not a team sport, and I took her words to heart: at the end of that semester, I severed all social ties with my cohort, avoided the art history office like the plague, and managed to finish my requirements with out-of-department classes.  Not surprisingly, my second year went much more smoothly than my first.

That didn’t make it less lonely though.

Another key element I could not have predicted was how badly I would miss my Boston people.  It wasn’t that I saw my friends and family every single day, but that they were there, and when shit hit the fan, they closed ranks around me immediately.  I vastly underestimated the value of proximity: having at least a dozen people you can hug without preamble, a few houses where you can show up unannounced in the middle of the night and not be turned away, and clusters of friends and family with whom to spend the small holidays that do not merit major travel.  Colorado is not, in fact, the edge of the known universe, but it felt that way sometimes. 

Even stranger to me was how much I missed Boston itself: the trolley bells and alarming creaking of the Green Line; the oddly onion-like smell of Harvard; the shockingly high ratio of Sox hats to heads anywhere in the city; the fact that anyone born and bred here over the age of forty calls me “dear” (pronounced “DEE-ah”); and that in spite of the ridiculous, meandering curves of the streets, the whole area is full of squares: Copley, Davis, Porter, Sullivan, Inman, Kenmore… and the list goes on.  And above all, I missed the loyalty: it’s what Boston does best.  They know who they are and who they cheer for, and somehow in my first four years here, I became a part of that identity too.

Hell, I even started giving a marginal crap about baseball, and believe me, that’s saying something.

When the bombs went off on Marathon Monday, I had an irrational and shockingly strong urge to get on a plane and go home.  I was exceptionally lucky in that none of my loved ones, who are often at the finish line for most of the day, were hurt (I will thank God for the rest of my days for one particular knee injury and one characteristicimpulse to do the dishes before heading out the door).  I was even luckier that I was able to get a hold of everyone almost immediately: all accounted for, all safe.  I thought I had mostly pulled myself together when I overheard two people talking on my bus in Boulder, mentioning the bombing as though it were an interesting news item and not an attack on my people, my city. 

My home.

I damn near vomited right there in their laps.

Visiting Boston a few months later, I figured out fairly quickly that there was one place I wanted to be, and ironically, it was the place I had left in pursuit of my supposed destiny.  There is potentially some wisdom in the idea that leaving—something, someone, somewhere—can clarify and intensify your need to go back.  Still, sometimes I feel a little stupid, as though I’ve come full circle right back to where I started.  The thing I have to keep in mind, though, is that I may have come back to where I started, but that does not mean that I never left or that I’m the same simply because the zip code is.

I’m proud that I left, that I struck out and did something completely uncharacteristic.  I’m glad that I figured out that I am not built for academia and, observing my fresh-out-of-undergrad cohort, that I had taken a few years off to do the figuring out and growing up that I needed to do.  I love the thesis that I wrote and the thinking that I did, and I’m simultaneously aware that it’s very important to figure out a way to talk about those things without sounding like an over-educated asshole. 

So in retrospect, I was wrong about where my people were, but ultimately my decision to go west was not.  My decision to come back east does not change that.  Those two equal and opposite decisions can in fact coexist.  Unsurprisingly, the lived geometry of my life directly contradicts the basic laws of mathematics: if you complete a circle, you will be right back where you started. 

Maybe that’s the key: I’m where I started, but not who I was when I did.  I’m still trying to do the best I can with what I have.  And what I have right now is a bemused awareness of the universe’s sense of humor, since it seems this circular path has brought me back to my city of squares.