Moving, Settling, Home

Baltimore, Maryland

I had a late night phone call with a friend a long time back. He was driving out of town to talk sense into the long distance girlfriend who’d just dumped him, and after trying to talk him out of a plan it seemed obvious could never work, I resigned myself to instead helping him stay awake for an hour so on the road.

I conducted my side of the call from the air mattress I slept on in my first Baltimore apartment and made note of it. I was paying too much for an apartment that was too far from work and too out-of-the-way for my social life, and so already plotting a move, and didn’t want to invest in a real bed only to have to move it. In that conversation, too, it came up that I had designs on ending my own long term, long distance relationship after I’d been fighting a lot with my girlfriend at the time. The distance between one another had only underscored in my mind that we didn’t need one another in each other’s lives.

He had a different takeaway from what I said. “You’re terrified of commitment.”

I protested, citing in particular that I’d always been relationship-oriented, scarcely interested in hookups or flings.

He countered that I wasn’t even willing to commit to a bed.

It was a silly, flawed argument, because not settling for sub-optimal situations wasn’t, or at least wasn’t necessarily synonymous with a fear of commitment. Nonetheless, as I look back over a decade later, there is some merit to the point that I was not ready to lay down roots just yet.

Corvallis, Oregon

It’s too facile to say I’m living the dream, but I’m certainly living one of them. Two apartments, one promotion, two committed relationships later, I’ve driven all my worldly possessions across the country to start the MFA program in creative writing that I’ve wanted, with varying degrees of commitment and intensity, to do since I learned MFA programs were a thing in the mid-2000s.

Moreover, I’m living with my fiancée. The learning curve from long-distance girlfriend to live-in girlfriend to fiancée has been steep, but now I am not resigned. I am in my element.

And I’ve won a contest. I have a voicemail from New Orleans promising good news, and before I even return the call, I do my best Daniel Bryan impression, extending my arms in the air, whisper-shouting yes! because it’s still the early morning and Heather is asleep.

And I think in this moment, more than ever, my life is coming into focus.

I also know this is temporary.

While my writing career may well be finding its sea legs and my love life has attained new heights, I’m also conscious of living in a bubble, not entirely different from my beloved summer camp days of my early teen years. Even if Heather and I were to stay in Oregon past the lifespan of my program, I know that this place in life is more than location-based. It’s about the people surrounding us, most of whom won’t be around in two years’ time and it’s about this point in my own development when every class session with Marjorie Sanford, Nick Dybek, and Elena Passarello feels important and impactful to who I might become as a writer.

This is a wonderful moment. This is fleeting.

Wilmington, North Carolina

Never have I had less of a sense of permanence about a place where I’ve lived than this. After half of a year bouncing between short-term rentals while we job-searched, quasi-vacationed, and tried on towns for size, we settled on Wilmington as a place we could imagine settling down, a place in reasonable proximity to family and friends, and a place with the sentimental attachment of having played host to our wedding.

But I’m working remotely, back in my Baltimore job, calling into meetings and conducting phone interviews from our home office. We have that, if only on a seven-month contract.

And we have a son on the way.

We learn we’re pregnant on our delayed honeymoon in Orlando, and the stakes of needing to find more permanent work with more permanent health insurance crystallizes.

There’s nothing keeping us here.

Oxford, Georgia

Our son is here. In the most simultaneously challenging and reward experience of my life, we’ve learned to care for a baby.

Correction: we’ve begun to learn, because if there’s one lesson I’ve internalized with any sureness it’s that we’ll never come close to having all the answers. The questions will always accumulate faster.

But will we stay? Will we go?

There are a lot of questions related to my career and Heather’s, not to mention the best place to raise Riley—the schools, the culture, the matter of proximity to family and friends.

Where I live seems to matter now more than ever, and yet, in the most profound of contradictions, it also does not.

Now, the concept of home is far less rooted in a town, nor neighborhood, much less a singular apartment or house. Now home is where we are.

Now, I am settled.

Then we moved to Vegas.