Elsewhere

I spent the better part of this summer away. I say ‘away’ because I call Texas home now, and I was elsewhere.

About as elsewhere as you can be, really - in a Southern California house on a hill, surrounded by shades of emerald and apple green, soaring eucalyptus and creeping ivy, dappled with clouds of purple hydrangeas and sky-high roses from coral to crimson. Those showy blooms were only humbled by their neighbors, a gasp of koi fish dipped in golds and honey, as if each extravagant sunset kept leaving a small drip behind, painting our little hill in technicolor.

There was the sea, too. A short drive from our backyard but lingering in the air. I forgot what it felt like to be so close to the water, but every time our car would crest over the hill and the ocean appeared, it felt like exhaling a long, held breath. It reminded me of the drives my family would take to Rhode Island - how the houses suddenly gave way to tall grass and low dunes and happiness was a short distance down a winding boardwalk. I should’ve gone to the beach more this summer, but as it turns out, my daughter doesn’t much care for sand.

Back on our hill, I would sometimes leave the balcony curtains of our bedroom open at night. There were a few tall buildings in the distance, and it reminded me of the city. I miss the comfort of those New York skyscrapers, like oversized night lights that never went out. I’d consider the distance between the girl in her cleverly tiny apartment under that skyline and the mother thinking about her now, in her king bed, with her two kids and her two chickens nearby. We could not be more different.

I am starting to believe that every place you live becomes a lifetime - that unlike travel, you leave behind more than you take with you. Travel is about collection. Language, customs, ideas, history - these are the things that help give us perspective. They make our world more prismatic. But living somewhere takes commitment. It’s about laying a piece of yourself down (they call them ‘roots’ for a reason). The girl in the low-ceilinged bedroom of that old New England tavern, the other one running up and down the West Side Highway, chasing a dream - those people feel more like old friends from distant places than part of me now. The only way to revisit them would be to go there.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have never lived somewhere else, to never bite the apple. There must be some comfort, even pride, in being so closely tied to one place, as essential to the landscape as the trees or the skyline. In West Texas, you’ll find these people - people who breathe the dust like oxygen, people who will talk you up and down about the perils of living here, but will scold you in kind if you slight their homeland. There can be an unease with someone like me, a transplant, digging my heels in the ground, trying to build a foundation. Trying to blend in. Not a tree, but a tumbleweed. More pirate than cowboy.

I live in Texas, but can I ever really be a Texan? Boston is where I’m from. New York is where I grew up. California is family.

Once you’ve lived so many lives in so many places, can you ever really go home?