Maybe my defenses are getting weaker in my old age, but it’s getting harder and harder for me to live a life split between two coasts.
I won’t lie - it’s always been hard on some level. Leaving to go to Mount Holyoke was devastating… I cried on so many plane-rides from Seattle to Hartford I can’t even count… but I got better at it, I got good at separating out my life, at counting out the months between when I was “home” and when I was “at school”… I got better at making those months count more, or count less… I studied abroad and that was okay.
Basically, I got good at keeping distance from getting to my heart.
I think you have to get good at that, to an extent, when your life looks like mine, geographically.
But now my home… well… I guess that’s the problem. I can’t lie, I can’t say I will ever be anything other than a Pacific Northwesterner… that’s where my heart is, and always will be. That’s not going to change, it’s just a part of who I am, that my soul is on the West Coast. And yet…
My life in DC has gotten closer to my heart than my life anywhere besides home… I have an apartment with a woman I love and two cats and friends I adore and it’s perfect… so I’m in a position where I always feel torn.
I’m missing home when I’m in DC, I’m missing DC when I’m home.
It’s tiring. I’m tired of always saying goodbye to someone. Of always having to put someone I love on hold to call someone else I love. I can’t do it anymore, I don’t have the strength or the energy to always be tearing myself away from someone I love so much. I’m tearing myself away from Liz to go to my family, or I’m tearing myself away from my family to go back to Liz - it’s getting to feel like each time I get on a plane and tear myself away from someone, I’m leaving a bigger and bigger piece of myself behind.
I’m sitting at home, all packed, waiting to get on the plane to go back to DC at 6am… feeling actual, physical pain at saying goodbye to my home and having to leave. There’s comfort in being here, Washington is my home, this is my family, this is where I belong. But then, I also belong with Liz.
It’s too painful to be in this middle place… too painful to have to flip-flop coasts for three weeks every seven months or so to see the people I love with all my heart, my own family… it’s too fucking hard.
I’m going to make a decision in 8-10 months that will put me either in DC or in Seattle, and what I decide will be where I am. I am not going to split my heart up like this, it’s too much. I need to know where I belong. My compass needs a North. I need to know where home is.
