Uprooting: notes on relocation

Hard to feel like I’m uprooting my life when it’s never felt rooted to begin with.

I was uprooted, not of my own volition, when I got myself here. I have experienced many disruptions and uprootings since I’ve been here but truly I’ve never actually been rooted. Anywhere. I am rooted within the family unit I’ve created. My roots are with people. But even those get ripped out. I am rooted where I am most responsible: here, in this 3-part family dynamic. This is where I tether myself like a dog tied to a tree, given freedom to roam but never to completely flee. I don’t want the freedom to flee from my life. I actually want the freedom to remain where I am, for once and for a long time. And I keep planting and re-planting myself in different soils, hoping this one is the one. This is the dirt that will feel like home. This is where I can finally sink my bones into the soil after the worms have eaten my flesh.

Choosing where to live, for me, is actually about choosing where to die. Another small and insane human act of trying to control that which is uncontrollable. I could die at the grocery store. But will the life I have crafted up until that fateful moment in the aisle be the kind of soil I want my body to rot in?

Building a life is a constant project and yet it’s one I feel I am always in the early phases of. That’s how I know this soil isn’t my soil. Here, I am an invasive species. I feel out of place because I am out of place. I have run out of places. My feet may be in the soil, but the places have always been about the people. And I know my people are elsewhere.

One of my favorite Lana Del Rey songs is Paris, Texas. She sings about traveling around the country and around the world, understanding when it’s time to move from one place to the next, and then the shock of returning home and finding it to be exactly the same and completely different all at once. She sings about knowing when it’s time to make your exit from a place, a person, a situation. I know in my bones that it is time to go.

When you know, you know

It’s time, it’s time to go

When you know, you know

That it’s time to leave

Like the summer breeze

But knowing and doing are two different things, and I knew when I realized that it was time to go that I would also be grieving. I told myself and my husband it was grief for the land, which is true; there is a connection I feel to the earth here that is sacred and I am so grateful to my younger self for trusting it. I said it was grief for the people I’m leaving behind and the relationships which have both blossomed and died in the last 12 years. But now I’m realizing it’s more than that. It’s that old grief for my unlived lives again. Every time I think I’m immune to the fig tree metaphor, life humbles me again. Barbault’s basket, I guess. The outer planets are the great humiliators, after all, so I don’t know why this realization surprised me. It’s not surprising. I myself am quite predictable.

I grieve for all the people I never got to become, the ones I wished to become, during my time here. The vast majority of my adult life has been spent here. I got here when I was 21; I’ll be 33 when I leave. Almost 12 years to the day. A full Jupiter cycle. I’ve been so many different people since I’ve been here, and I love all of them deeply and tenderly. They are the same ghosts I pass by when I drive down a familiar street or find myself standing at a bus stop I used to stand at before work.

When I leave, and arrive in a brand new place, there will be no ghosts—not yet. But I’ll come with the ingredients to make some, rest assured. I will bring all of my curiosities and my fantasies and my anticipation of uncovering the story being told. I will bring all of my tenderest hopes and aspirations alongside what few belongings we drag across a continent with us. I will bring my child, and all of the delicate hopes I hold for him, as a mother dutifully does. I will try not to think about all of the new ways I can disappoint both him and myself with this new opportunity. I will bring my marriage, and treat it like the sturdy foundation it is so we can start building upon it. I will bring all of this with me and this will inevitably create ghosts. Time has a way of doing that.

I can’t escape the fig tree, no matter how hard I try.

I keep getting spam phone calls from a number with my hometown’s area code. It feels like a beckoning I cannot answer to. My literal home is calling me but the actual calling is to build a home elsewhere. A life elsewhere. I have to let those figs rot.

I have run out of resentments for all of the ways I’ve been let down and all of the ways I’ve failed others in my relationships. I don’t want to leave this place with a hardened heart, closing myself off to what beautiful & precious connections have been fostered here. I want to leave to run toward something, to be in pursuit of a glorious love for life. I want to live the life I have instead of pining for the life I want and can’t have. I want to nurture friendships that bring me more into myself and into presence with my life instead of ruminating over the friendships that never came to be. I want to surround my son with people who delight in his presence instead of asking people to love him out of obligation.

Most of all, I want to find my way back to myself.

When you’re home, you’re home

You’re home when you’re alone