On a rainy weekend that felt more like mid fall than early spring, my boyfriend and I drove out east to Long Island. The traffic that gave me a headache began to ease when we pulled off the highway and into outskirts of my hometown. Outside the car window were houses I had passed a million times, my old high school that I hated going to, and the stoplight that I have sat in front of countless times before. There is something sad about returning to the place where you grew up, if you still can. I no longer live there, but when I return I miss the days when I did. But if I stick around my hometown for too long, I want to get out and feel the growing pains I felt as a teenager all over again. I look back on my teenage years and think, "I did it! I made it out of my hometown!" but being there, I feel so lost in the sleepiness of suburbia that I begin to think that moving back home wouldn't be so bad.
We went out on that Friday night and saw friends and being out and about was honestly disorienting. No one on Long Island is wearing a mask, and I felt uneasy being in a wall to wall packed bar. I also learned that I totally don't remember how to be like I used to be when I would go out before Covid-19. I had a wildly uncomfortable conversation with a woman I had been introduced to, and when she stormed away from me, a close friend came up to me and asked how things were going. I told her that I don't think I remember how to be out in public properly, because when people are asking me questions, I am answering honestly and not lying with my responses to make people feel more comfortable like I used to do. No inner work has been done on this issue, and I have not even thought about being more honest in conversations, but with these past two years and and the bs that I have endured personally, I don't have it in me to sugarcoat or cushion my conversations anymore. I don't think twice about what I say when I am at work with colleagues or at home with my boyfriend, so I may have become too comfortable with being too honest with myself and others. This seems like it should be a good thing, but I am seeing that strangers who don't know me are taken aback when I don't follow the rules of small talk. But then again, I have always hated following the rules of anything.
Saturday was laundry sprawled out on the dining room table, hazelnut iced coffee, zoom calls for interviews for this blog, and The Circle on Netflix. We also watched the qualifying rounds for the Miami F1 race. We ordered in from my favorite Chinese restaurant and just relaxed, it was a welcome reprieve from the loud noises of the city. My bedroom, now a guest room, still feels very much like mine and we slept a lot. There is the bookshelf I stole from my sister's room, sea shells from Sanibel Island, and a framed photo of Julie Andrews after she won her Academy Award (I went through a huge Julie Andrews phase as a teenager). A blue tapestry that hangs on my bedroom wall hides the scrawlings that seventeen year old me wrote long ago. Pen, pencil, and sharpie expose the quotes I loved, words I liked, and my height at various ages and dates. Seeing these markings makes me sad, and I wish I could go back and chat with my seventeen year old self to prepare her for what is to come. But then I think, would my advice be enough? Perhaps she will have to go out and live it for herself.
My sister's room is a skeleton of what it once was, as it was raided for furniture when she moved into Manhattan and needed furnishings for her apartment. There was one point in time when my sister and I shared her bedroom when were were pre-teens, which is so insane to me because there were two bedrooms for the both of us! For whatever reason, my mom agreed to let us room together and we fought all the time. I moved back into my designated bedroom in my teenage years, and would often sneak back into my sister's room to use her iMac computer when she was away at university. I would log onto tumblr dot com and chat with friends and other random teenage strangers from across the US. We reblogged pictures of sunflowers, high quality photos of french fries, and the occasional photo set of The Jonas Brothers. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you are probably better off. We had fun, it's hard to explain, ahhh you just had to be there. And then Yahoo bought tumblr and I went off to college and it faded away from my internet subconscious. I still have my tumblr blog from all those years ago and I occasionally scroll through the images that I thought spoke to me in a way nothing else could. Now in the present day, my sister and I randomly live in the same neighborhood in the city and we try to get together on various weekends. We don't fight as we once did, but I am still known to borrow her clothes without permission from time to time. That habit will unfortunately never die.
When I return home I am reminded of who I am and how I got to be how I am, for better or worse. My dad tells me of the unfairness and traumatic happenings of his childhood, and how he moved around a lot. I've heard these stories before, but paid close attention to location this time. He kept telling me of the cross streets of his various homes in Brooklyn, and I looked them up on google maps street view to get a sense of what he used to know. Both my parents have not returned back to (or have access to) their childhood homes, and the homes they have now are what they cling to. I have a bunch of friends who say that they have never felt like they've had a permanent home, and that life seems like one long move. As a city dweller, I often think of if and when I'll have to move again and how that will impact my life. I've lived in my current apartment for almost three years, and it wasn't until a year in that I felt comfortable enough buying more furniture and settling in. There is bravery in settling into a place that isn't permanent, I think.
If I had to choose between the sound of a lawnmower or a traffic jam outside my window on a Saturday morning, I would choose neither and put on my noise cancelling headphones. A friend of mine has gotten me veeery interested in white noise machines, and I'm thinking about making a purchase because I hate the noise no matter where I am. And it's never about the home itself, but who you are sharing that home with. Being back where I grew up reminds me that I am no longer a kid, and that I am out in the world on my own and it all feels a bit like whiplash. We are all just kids walking around in grown up bodies, white knuckling it through the fire.
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