Ain’t No Place Like Home

Graduation week, I couldn’t even count how many people were gushing about how excited they were to get out of our small town and try something new. To leave the gossipy moms who know everyone’s business, to never have to make the walk from the parking lot to the front doors of high school before sunrise, to go somewhere where the local grocery store clerk doesn’t know you by name. I felt the same way. I’m sure everyone does, at some point. Spending all of your adolescence trapped in a rainy, mountain-framed bubble in Washington can leave you aching for something brighter and bigger, and more than anything, different.

We’re all familiar with the quintessential idea of the “small town.” It’s everywhere. Every hallmark movie, every stickily nostalgic bedroom pop song. We grow up in our small towns, we learn in our small towns, we have all of our “firsts” in our small towns, but it’s never the final destination. The idea of getting out, of making it to New York or LA or Paris or overseas, of going to college or getting a job in a skyscraper. The great adventure that follows. The actual destination. Everyone wants it.

I have always shared this hope for the next big thing, the next big move. I dreamed, for my entire childhood, about the city I’d eventually move away to next. Especially during the depths of COVID, after going on my 100th drive alone, through the same neighborhoods and backroads I’d circled thousands of times, I was so ready to be out. Applying to colleges my senior year, all I could think about was getting as far away as possible. Colorado, Utah, Hawaii. My eyes were set on unfamiliar places, where I could start completely over, and escape my bubble.

And so, it’s just that I did. In March, I committed to the University of Utah, a whole 12-hour drive away from my hometown. I was trading one set of mountains for another and heading south. The decision, at first, had me floating. I was getting the biggest redo button of all time, to start fresh in a big city with an ocean of opportunities flooding my future. It was exactly everything I had ever wanted. Every afternoon sitting on local curbs drinking iced Red Bulls from a drive-through stand with my friends. Every long night sipping on wine coolers in the backyard of whoever’s parents were out of town that weekend. Every drive through the fields at sunset, surrounded by a whole lot of nothing. All that time, I had considered a build-up. It was all temporary, it was all a rehearsal for what was to come. 

Now, as I am writing this, I leave in less than three weeks. Seeing my countdown go from being in the hundreds, to being in the teens, is sort of terrifying. It has always been what I wanted, but I have found myself so much more conscious of how I am spending my time. I find myself desperately savoring the “lasts,” in ways I never appreciated the “firsts.” Every time I go somewhere or drive a certain street, I wonder if I won’t return before I go. Watching my best friend drive away from my house for the last time to board a plane to Italy, and knowing I wouldn’t be here for her to come home to, made me realize maybe I’m not ready yet. 

​​The outskirts of Seattle, all of the towns nestled next to each other in the shadow of Rainier, may not be the most special thing in the whole world. Everyone may know everybody’s business. It may be unbearably grey in the winters. There might be nothing more exciting to do in the whole town on the weekends in the fall than go to a high school football game. But as I am getting ready to leave, I realize that nothing else, for the rest of my life, will ever feel like home in the way this all does. 

So many moments that I thought of as passing the time, looking back, were so much more meaningful in the long run than I expected. The drives at 2 am to the 24-hour Mcdonald’s to get strawberry watermelon slushies. The afternoons I spent at the lake doing math homework after school. Waving to all of the chocolate brown cows who populate the grassy fields, sleeping lazily in the sun. Walking around downtown during Christmas, freezing to death while gripping onto a Starbucks hot chocolate. Experiencing my first losses, first heartbreaks, and first struggles with growing up. All of it has taken place in this little bubble, and regardless of how much I thought I was too good for it all, it was shaping me. 

What scares me most of all is not the world-changing while I’m gone. The same coffee shops will be on the same corners, right where I left them. The same trees and mountains will have grown taller, and packed with snow, awaiting my arrival home. What terrifies me is that while home may stay stagnant, it’s me who has to change and grow. Everything will be waiting for me when I come back, but it is I, not the town, that is going to be different. These moments I am noticing myself holding onto extra-long are the moments when I know that I won’t ever quite be this version of myself ever again.

I went on a drive the other night. The hot wind that only exists in Washington in the midst of July whipping my curls into knots as I zoomed down the roads I have a million times. Doing my usual loop, listening to music way too loud, and passing through the place I grew up. I looked at it all a little differently. I thought to myself that it was very possible that it was not my small town itself I was trying to get out of. Maybe I was trying to escape my fear of not succeeding. Maybe I was trying to escape the obvious growing and working on myself that I was avoiding. Maybe I was trying to run away from myself entirely. After all, my town is both an extension of myself, while simultaneously I am an extension of it. 

Someone I loved once recently told me that if you really cared for something deeply, a little bit of it will always linger. I am starting to think that way about my home. I have counted down the days and saved every penny and bought my “Go Utes!” t-shirts for so long, only to realize I will never be able to hate this place, my home, no matter how insignificant I once thought it to be in the grand scheme of the globe. So now, I look into the future with much more sadness than I ever expected to; but sometimes, healing looks a lot like leaving.