Changing My Mind About Home

According to the counting app on my phone, I am now 165 days into pandemic induced exile, and I am feeling the weight of it in ways that I haven't previously experienced it. I have been restless in my tiny little apartment. Cooking is no longer soothing; it has been reduced to a grey-tinted chore. Afternoon naps that I once relished have given way to lying in my bed scrolling the internet, remembering to buy things that I had no prior memory of needing. My dogs now look at me as if I am getting on their last nerve. The monotony of it all is a brick wall that I have crashed into in slow motion. Amidst this wreckage, I have been pondering life choices, which upon closer reflection, might be too heavy for this moment, although the abundance of languishing time yields itself quite nicely to this kind of torture. Friends close and near always ask of me "How is NYC treating you?". A closer confidant asked me "How am I feeling about being in New York right now?" This is a more befitting question, as it causes me to be honest. And as if I am wearing a cloak woven by Veritas herself, I am able to say "I miss the city and wandering through it, but I don't know what this place actually is without that. And as such, I don't know my purpose in being here." Yes, I could easily get in my car and head south on I-87, wandering through the Bronx to the Isle of Manhattan, but as a recent transplant, I'd only jut begun to adapt to NY in its pre-COVID existence. That in an of itself took a lot. I don't know that I have the energy to learn it anew. If I stay, I know that this is now part of the syllabus. A master course in flexibility. I tire just thinking about it. I suppose that I am lucky in that if I decide to leave, there is always home, or the place that carries the moniker. The South is the devil that I know best. The one that creeps into my thoughts and my speech when I am deep into an emotion, good or bad. Recently, when I got a call that suddenly my mom had to have a kidney removed, I seriously considered waltzing with that demon once again. There is a subtle joy and agony in thinking about being home. The Brazilians call this saudade. The emotion of an unexpected health crisis coupled with missing the idea of a thing had me ready to pack it all up and figure out how to get back home. In the time since that phone call, I've talked to my family and they seem to be well in spite of my physical absence. What would I be rushing back to other than the mental machinations of being tethered to home and falsely believing that I am needed? While I am loved and will always have a place there, there is a clear reason why I left. I am not needed there. To realize this is sobering, but you would think after nearly 4 years away, it wouldn't knock the wind out of me the way that it does. Moving to New York was always meant to allow me to sit in the idea of needing myself and giving her all of the love, care, and attention she required to be whole and full. Stripped of distractions, I now realize that what I am needing is a place to belong. One of my favorite quotes, and ironically, the one I butcher most often, is "the place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it". When he uttered this words, James Baldwin found him self deep inside a phases of incessant wandering, looking to escape American tyranny and the angst created a world that never seemed to open up enough to accommodate someone like him. I've not wandered globally for extended periods of time, but like Baldwin, I have found it hard to stay put in any one place for very long and not be met with the feeling of being out of place. I am reading a book and in it the author, far away from home, finds herself in Burundi, uncomfortable, but unwilling to relent. She says something that is reminiscent of what my former trainer used to say about completing repetitions: "...the moment you want to leave is probably when you should try hard to stay." Like her, I stay because I don't know where else I'd go at this moment. Unlike her, I don't think that I have given myself permission to continue the process of personal exploration. The process of making. The process of unfurling. I still don't know who I am if I am not crumpled tightly. I don't know the terrain of my edges and ending well enough to ascertain fit. Even in my attempts to open up, I am still wrinkled and worn by the creasing of my need for safety, stability.... predictability. Things that I can control. Being in New York was always meant to thrown me into things I cant control; things that pull me apart so that I could discard what no longer worked and reconfigured the bits and pieces that do work, while leaving room for new things to take hold. I don't know that I am doing such a good job of that in the midst of this pandemic. I find myself wanting to recoil, and in many ways I have. I don't venture out much, and I use this pandemic as a fitting excuse not to. Its all a lie though; pretext at its worst. I am ready to run again; not knowing where I am running to or how long before I come up with another excuse to run again. Hearkening to the whispers of Baldwin's quote, I feel like maybe I have given up trying to make a home. I spend too much time entertaining the "what ifs" that I don't know the true nature of "what is". I fancy myself on notions that home is on the other side of another move. Again, its a lie that I have told myself so many times before. I've moved a lot and I still evade doing the work of creating a sense of belonging. I reasoned that maybe I am not at home in my own body, having real experiences, interacting with places and things in real time. Place becomes a convenient scapegoat for avoiding hard things... I often wondered what would have become of me if I stayed in places that I fled? Who would I be now if I just dug my heels in and resolved to stay beyond the moment I felt like leaving? I don't linger in this thought process long because it wont change my current situation. So yeah, living in New York during a pandemic is not what I'd imagined it would be, but that doesn't mean that I cant continue to deconstruct a tightly-wound me such that I can finally touch the raw edges. Feel what I need and figure out a way to make me home no matter where I might find myself. There is no need to flee New York, I tell myself. Its not the thing that is making this hard. It's me and I'm running out of energy trying to escape her. I have to make peace with this home I call self.