My Hometown?

“Everybody has a love/hate relationship with their hometown . . . I am Mr. Born to Run. I am Mr. Thunder-fucking-road. I was born to run, not to stay. My home, New Jersey, it’s a death trap. It’s a suicide rap. Listen to the lyrics! I gotta get out, I gotta hit the highway . . . I am going to run, run, run and I am never coming back.

I currently live 10 minutes from my hometown.

But ‘Born to Come Back’? Who woulda bought that shit?”

-Bruce Springsteen, from Springsteen on Broadway

Like any good sucker punch, I was not expecting the metaphorical cheap shot to my heart as I stepped onto the jetway at Sky Harbor Airport yesterday. I had spent the last two weeks in Durango, Colorado, for work and was making my way home to my old man on American Airlines. Durango has the size airport where everyone has to use a gangplank to get off any plane, so a direct flight to Columbus, Ohio was out of the question.

On the way to Durango two weeks earlier, my layover had been in Dallas, Texas. The layover had also been so short it consisted of me sprinting from one gate to another, laptop bag bouncing off my rear end as I ran, just in time to get on board and avoid being left behind. This leg of the trip was going differently: my flight from Durango was on time and I had a four-hour layover in Phoenix before I was going to be able to catch my connecting flight home.

The warm air was what pushed me into the black hole of my compartmentalized feelings about the place I grew up in. Even though the weather in Durango had been warmer than Ohio, that amounted to 45 degree average highs. It was 73 degrees when I landed in Phoenix yesterday, a nearly cloudless, sunny day–the kind of day I took for granted each winter I had spent as a child in Arizona. The moment before, I had been reviewing the ever-present to do list in my mind about what e-mails I was going to send once I sat down at the nearest, most decent coffee shop I could find in the terminal. A few seconds later, I was fighting back tears, feeling a previously imperceptible lasso of sadness tightening around my chest. I had no idea I was in danger of being caught until it was too late.

“Do your parents still live in Arizona?” is the question I often get when acquaintances learn I grew up in the Grand Canyon State. At 37 years old, this inquiry still conjures an uncomfortable pause in my speech. When I answer in the negative, many people continue on, “Any siblings? Aunts, uncles?” I explain my one brother lives in Washington, D.C. At this point my discomfort, more subtle some days than others, begins to penetrate the conversation, and the topic usually changes to something else, anything else. Sometimes I am pressed further and then I confess, “I don’t really know many people who live in Arizona any more.”

This line of questioning invokes guilt in me every single time, like I secretly had my parents bumped off by an assassin, and I am covering something up. I have evolved a lot over the last several years, but I still have some work to do to suppress my once ever-present desire to please people, all people, and meet their expectations. People who have lived in the same place their whole lives, which is many people I meet in my travels for work, probably frown when I say I don’t know anyone in Arizona any more because they can’t imagine not knowing anyone in the place they grew up. But part of me thinks they are frowning at me because I am different, because I failed in some way.

It is rarely appropriate to respond by bringing up my primary reason for leaving and staying away from Arizona in my twenties: between my mother and an ex-love interest I couldn’t manage to shake, I was sure I was going to end up dead. Even before my father passed away, we were already talking about when he would move to LA. He loved Venice, thanks in part to Ray Bradbury’s book Death is a Lonely Business, and we envisioned together margaritas on the beach as I goaded him into planning to sit for whatever equivalency procedures would be required from him to be admitted to the California Bar. Arizona was in the rear view mirror.

As someone who has moved a bunch, I have come to take solace in the old adage “Home is where the heart is.” I fell in love with Columbus a few weeks into my first visit for an internship with my firm: people were nice, good food and beer were to be had, and it was just big enough to be fun but not so big as to overwhelm or crush. Columbus tattooed itself permanently onto my soul when it brought me to Basil, changing my life forever. While I have Columbus routines, I also am still discovering new things to love about it, as it is a vibrant enough locale to ensure things are growing and changing at a remarkable rate. August 2019 would mark five years I have lived in Columbus.

I use the phrase “would mark” because there is a chance we might not be in Columbus by August 2019: I recently got offered an opportunity at work which would result in a move back west. While we are still awaiting final confirmation, I am already beginning to think about the things I want to do in Columbus in the next several months, aware it might be the last time I get to do those things for quite a while, or, depending on what life brings, the last time I do them, ever.

Basil is excited about the potential move and is the perfect antidote to my anxious tendencies and residual PTSD I have from the moves I went through before I met him. He can tell when I am getting myself wound up, worrying about things well in advance of the date where worrying is warranted, and soothes me, telling me it will be okay. And I know that as long as we are together, it will be okay. Home is not just where my heart is, but also where his heart is.

So if that’s all true, why was I sitting at a cafe in Phoenix Sky Harbor, trying not to cry as I my heart rejoiced at the sight of Camelback Mountain?

I have felt lost for decades on end, regardless of my physical location, the feeling was only alleviated in the last few years as I felt things start coming together between figuring out my love life, figuring out my career, and figuring out what I think I want from the next few years. I see a vibrant, exciting path ahead of Basil and I, but I don’t see that path taking us back to Arizona to live. How can I feel more on track than I ever have and still well up with tears at the sight of Phoenix landmarks?

More than one person I have talked to about leaving Phoenix quote Tom Wolfe and say, “You can’t go home again.” I hate that fucking quote: it embodies a hopeless nihilism I cannot abide by. You CAN go home again, but you have to be able to deal with how you have evolved and how the place you called home has evolved and the discomfort resulting from these changes. Saying you simply cannot go implies, to me, we are not capable of overcoming the challenges presented by our ever-shifting identities.

Instead, I call upon the wisdom of Bruce Springsteen, just as I have in during many other philosophical debates with myself. Leaving the place you grew up in like your life depends on it is part of the human experience. And so is the alluring comfort brought by going back to where you came from. Life is an open road, and it goes in both directions: towards the familiar and onward into the unknown. The choice is ours.