[i've accepted now home may never exist]
I'm starting to wonder what permanence feels like.
I realized today the extent to which my life is measured by the gaps between larger things - the moments of stillness between frantic movement, the short weeks where I am allowed to regroup before life comes flying at me again. I'm stuck in the longest one now - summer, a heavy, liminal summer, my last summer between Oklahoma and Germany, between new and newer.
I thought about how long it has been since I have called a place - a physical space, the place where I put my things and rest my head - home. How everything, for the past two or three years, has been temporary, has been tempered by the knowledge of impending change. I thought about the apartments I never quite managed to live in, the room I share with my sister now that mine has been given away, the myself-defining boxes of Things stacked up in a storage shed a thousand miles away, which will smell like dust and weather when I go back next year no matter how tightly taped the boxes.
There is sacrifice in opportunity, and these are the times when I feel it hardest. It's the in-between times that make all the things missing feel like holes in me - all the things I own that I will not see until some vague point in the future when I am done traveling, all the memories I can't fit into a box and drag along with me (that I found still gathering dust in the attic the other day, not quite forgotten but too bulky to remember), all the friendships I might not manage to keep alive and all the relationships it just doesn't feel worth it to start.
My life is spectacular. I have seen so many more places, truly known so many more places, than so many people get to. I chose to travel, to run as fast as I could in the opposite direction from the familiar while the opportunity was given to me, and I have not regretted it yet. This is more than worth it; I am happy, I am excited, I am sending emails and making preparations and there is another apartment that isn't mine waiting for me in Paderborn, waiting to hold my stuff for another year while I adventure and learn and... become a better person or something, I don't know, while I fuck around in Germany and find new people to know and love and leave behind.
The sacrifice is worth it, I think. But it's in these slow moments between the flat sprints that have become most of my life that I find myself thinking about the things I decided not to have because of this, and kind of wondering when I'm finally going to settle down and call a place my own, and plan years in the future instead of weeks. I wonder, twenty years old and single for two years, if I will ever have the time to get to know just one person better than I've ever known anyone else, with no immediate threat of unconquerable distance between us.
I don't know. My life is great, but sometimes I feel stretched very thin. Sometimes I get tired of missing people, of watching their lives become something new without me. Sometimes I feel guilty that the constant state of flux in which I live pulls me farther away from people I really, truly love but cannot keep without sacrificing what I travel so far to find, the purpose of all my movement in the first place.
Someday I want to fill a house with a lot of things that I and maybe one other person find beautiful, and that we have chosen together and arranged together and that is, in some way, an extension of us, an establishment of something intangible that we do not see changing. Someday I want to live somewhere; someday, I want my driver's license to come from the state I actually reside in, wherever that may be. Someday I want to have an answer when people ask me where I'm from. Someday I want to talk about where I live without using the words "for now." Someday, I would like to be a fixed point in space.
It's not the time for that now, and it isn't going to be for a while. That's okay with me. This is a good time, a time when movement is what I need, what I thrive on, and what will take me most quickly to where I want to go. I'm not tired of this yet. But I know people who talk about permanence like a trap, and I feel a little guilty sometimes that I, with all the opportunity I've been given. really want nothing else from the hypothetical someday of my deepest life wishes than a little permanence.
I have always grounded myself in place. I have always been good at establishing a home very quickly in a place unfamiliar to me. I have always loved exploring, and finding the things about a strange place that make it perfect for me, and it's served me well everywhere I've been so far. But man, on the more selfish of my nights, I wish I had just one person with me all the time; I wish I had a single place that I could truly call my own.
I realized today the extent to which my life is measured by the gaps between larger things - the moments of stillness between frantic movement, the short weeks where I am allowed to regroup before life comes flying at me again. I'm stuck in the longest one now - summer, a heavy, liminal summer, my last summer between Oklahoma and Germany, between new and newer.
I thought about how long it has been since I have called a place - a physical space, the place where I put my things and rest my head - home. How everything, for the past two or three years, has been temporary, has been tempered by the knowledge of impending change. I thought about the apartments I never quite managed to live in, the room I share with my sister now that mine has been given away, the myself-defining boxes of Things stacked up in a storage shed a thousand miles away, which will smell like dust and weather when I go back next year no matter how tightly taped the boxes.
There is sacrifice in opportunity, and these are the times when I feel it hardest. It's the in-between times that make all the things missing feel like holes in me - all the things I own that I will not see until some vague point in the future when I am done traveling, all the memories I can't fit into a box and drag along with me (that I found still gathering dust in the attic the other day, not quite forgotten but too bulky to remember), all the friendships I might not manage to keep alive and all the relationships it just doesn't feel worth it to start.
My life is spectacular. I have seen so many more places, truly known so many more places, than so many people get to. I chose to travel, to run as fast as I could in the opposite direction from the familiar while the opportunity was given to me, and I have not regretted it yet. This is more than worth it; I am happy, I am excited, I am sending emails and making preparations and there is another apartment that isn't mine waiting for me in Paderborn, waiting to hold my stuff for another year while I adventure and learn and... become a better person or something, I don't know, while I fuck around in Germany and find new people to know and love and leave behind.
The sacrifice is worth it, I think. But it's in these slow moments between the flat sprints that have become most of my life that I find myself thinking about the things I decided not to have because of this, and kind of wondering when I'm finally going to settle down and call a place my own, and plan years in the future instead of weeks. I wonder, twenty years old and single for two years, if I will ever have the time to get to know just one person better than I've ever known anyone else, with no immediate threat of unconquerable distance between us.
I don't know. My life is great, but sometimes I feel stretched very thin. Sometimes I get tired of missing people, of watching their lives become something new without me. Sometimes I feel guilty that the constant state of flux in which I live pulls me farther away from people I really, truly love but cannot keep without sacrificing what I travel so far to find, the purpose of all my movement in the first place.
Someday I want to fill a house with a lot of things that I and maybe one other person find beautiful, and that we have chosen together and arranged together and that is, in some way, an extension of us, an establishment of something intangible that we do not see changing. Someday I want to live somewhere; someday, I want my driver's license to come from the state I actually reside in, wherever that may be. Someday I want to have an answer when people ask me where I'm from. Someday I want to talk about where I live without using the words "for now." Someday, I would like to be a fixed point in space.
It's not the time for that now, and it isn't going to be for a while. That's okay with me. This is a good time, a time when movement is what I need, what I thrive on, and what will take me most quickly to where I want to go. I'm not tired of this yet. But I know people who talk about permanence like a trap, and I feel a little guilty sometimes that I, with all the opportunity I've been given. really want nothing else from the hypothetical someday of my deepest life wishes than a little permanence.
I have always grounded myself in place. I have always been good at establishing a home very quickly in a place unfamiliar to me. I have always loved exploring, and finding the things about a strange place that make it perfect for me, and it's served me well everywhere I've been so far. But man, on the more selfish of my nights, I wish I had just one person with me all the time; I wish I had a single place that I could truly call my own.