#41 flying home

returning to an old place as a new person

I think 2022 is over for me in every way possible, even if the calendar says there are still a few weeks of it left. I’m mentally and emotionally hunkered out. My brain is numb, going through the same loop of a workday, zombie like, refusing to register any real emotion.

The singular thing I’m looking forward to is taking a cab to JFK this Saturday and flying home, two years after I left. I need a hard reset.

My parents keep calling to tell me they can’t wait to see me, that my childhood bedroom has been set up just the way I like it, that they’ll be at the airport when I land. My best friend said she’d make an embarrassing sign and be at the arrivals gate with them, holding it up.

I adore all three of them, but I’m afraid of the waiting-at-the-airport kind of love, because I don’t want to be reminded how far away I live from it. In New York, I’ve grown into an incredibly isolated, loveless life. Nobody has touched me, or really looked at my face, or hugged me in a long time. So going home, thinking about them at the airport, grinning as I walk out - it scares me. It feels like a clock will start to tick in my mind, reminding me constantly - don’t get used to this.

My hometown is a slow moving city brimming with old memories. I feel so distanced from the life I had there - the same three bars everyone goes to, the same slow crawl of traffic, and the same old constrained worldview that stopped making sense to me a long time ago. Maybe it’s changed while I’ve been gone, but my intuition tells me I will find that things are just the way I left them.

A few months ago, a friend from that old life happened to be in New York, and we met at a cocktail bar that I frequently go to after work. There was a time when he was the most popular boy at school and had no idea I existed. And then, three years later, there was a time we saw each other without any clothes on. At the counter, I ordered off the menu drinks and had barely taken a sip when he said, “You’re so different. It feels like I don’t know you.” I rolled my eyes at him. You’ve seen me naked, I pointed out.

But he was right, because I feel different. I feel like I went away to some intensive self improvement camp, and if parallel universes exist, if my old and current self walked past each other and brushed shoulders, we’d never even stop to greet one another. In most ways I’m more fully formed than I ever was, and in other ways, I’m very hollow.

It frightens me to imagine the trajectory my life would have taken if I’d never left - would I have married some mediocre man by now because everyone said it was the next logical step? Would I have worked at a thankless and ordinary job? Would I have never known what it means to find yourself in a foreign country, absolutely alone, at rock bottom, and then crawl your way out on your hands and knees? Would I have tapped into the relentless ambition I have now, or the rage I wake up with every day that I use as fuel? Would I never hurtle through the middle of 5th Avenue, my new dreams so big and audacious I hardly believe they could come true? Then again, I used to think New York was an audacious dream, and now I’m here. So many untapped parts of me have been unleashed here, under horrible circumstances, and the way I approach everything has spun.

I know I need to get on that flight and I need to see my old friends and I need to sit on the swing in my front porch and I need to revisit the old bars I still love and I need to hug my grandmothers because I have this debilitating fear that they’ll forget my face in the next few years. I need to eat my favorite foods and I need to hear all the things my best friend worries about in person and try to make sense of them with her. I need to drive by my old school, the mall where I fell in love with AJ, the restaurants where I cried my eyes out, the Starbucks where I edited my first book - all the places that built me into the person who was able to get on the flight that took her away from it all.

And yet, I’m terrified. I’m terrified I’m going to disagree with everyone about everything. I’m terrified that I’m no longer a palatable person for the city I grew up in, and the same things I once accepted as normal will annoy me. I’m afraid to run into people who used to know me but will now find me unrecognizable and hardened and frigid. I’m terrified I’ll cry once a day, that my stomach will not agree with the food, that the weather and pollution and traffic will put me in a shitty mood, that when extended family ask me deeply personal and intrusive questions, I will want to run around the room barking like an unfriendly dog.

I’m mostly terrified that going back to the place I grew up in for twenty four years, the only place I called home - it won’t feel like home anymore. That if someday I get tired of the life I’m building in Manhattan, there will be nowhere to return, and I’ll be stuck between two worlds, unable to choose either.

It’s just a flight, I know. It’s just two weeks. I want to go and I don’t. But the trip is booked and this morning I sat at my work desk, selected my seats and meals and came home and sent out my laundry and ordered presents for everyone I will see. It’s happening, whether I want it to or not.

I’ll write soon to tell you how it all goes, of course. Until then - happy holidays and all my love.