Jokingly, I’ve told people that I feared I’d wake up one day and announce that I had the craziest dream that I lived in Europe for two years. Well, If it was a dream, it was a most amazing dream, one in which I traveled the world, met new friends, hiked the mountains, played hockey in the snow, rode horses through the Swiss countryside, lost love, discovered love, got healthy, found myself.
And so I’m compelled to ask, was this return to what I call home really a good idea in the end? California, or rather, what I know as “home” is this deafening cacophony of demands on my body and soul. While most people might see a return to home as a time to relax, I see it as what I have grown up knowing it to be - a pushing, shoving, fall down, get up, scrambling race to get things, to get somewhere, to get whatever it is that I think I need before someone else gets it. A day after I’d landed in the bay I was in my car, which, like me, had picked up right where it left off and started up immediately after two years in storage, racing around the local highways with inexplicable urgency. I was eating with wooden chopsticks out of Chinese take-out boxes, then throwing them away to dash off to my next appointment. The phone was ringing, my inbox was overflowing, and I was still opening paper mail hours later. I’d made offers on houses, on horses, on work; I even half-heartedly tried to make offers on love but all I’d get in return is, “No Jess, you shouldn’t miss me.”
A long time ago someone I went to school with in Pittsburgh said to me regarding our imminent graduation, “Of course I’m going back (to California). My life is magical there.” I’ll admit, for years I didn’t understand how anyone’s life could be that wondrous anywhere, let alone in California where I’d spent so much of my life unhappy in the midst of seemingly impossible opportunity. What I learned half a decade later is that living an amazing life isn’t really a location-based accident. Ironically, I had to move to another country to make this discovery. Out of my element, I couldn’t make assumptions, couldn’t lay blame, had to react with curiosity and wonder to all things new, good and bad. People who have visited countries like to tell you lots of things about that country, about things they’ve seen on the surface or stuff they “know to be true” because they were there. But as I’ve said before, visiting isn’t living, and when you visit you take with you all of your prejudices and you hold onto them because there is no reason to let go, no need to integrate or understand or make friends. You’ll be home in days or a week, and you’ll be back to what you know.
When I returned to California what I feared most of all was returning not to the place, but to my prejudices and my experiences and myself, to that past person always unhappy and forever chasing the unreachable lure. But serendipitously, that person isn’t here anymore. I even looked for her, sought her out, challenged her to appear by falling back into my chaotic routine. She’s gone, and more importantly, she was never me. The person I came back from Europe with is me, was always me, just locked away for a long time waiting for freedom. When you wake up from a dream you’re the same person who fell asleep. This wasn’t a dream.
I was in Alicante, leaning on both elbows towards the person on the other side of my table when I said out loud, “My life is magical. I know what this means now.” And I knew, from that moment on, that wherever I went in the world my life would continue to be magical. I knew this because it’s not a place or a person or a thing that makes it so. It’s me. And the person across from me smiled and said, “It’s true.”
February 25th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment
