Three Years In.

But come Monday morning/ no country song will sing me home again.

If you’re just joining me, three years ago I moved with my boyfriend (now husband) from Richmond, VA, where I’d always lived, to Beaverton, OR. Writing about the move itself was easy. Writing about my feelings is not.

Homesickness is a form of grief. You are mourning a place, sure, but you are also mourning who you were in that place and how you fit neatly into a you-shaped space there. You are mourning the ease with which you could be there, knowing which direction you were facing, where you’ll be welcomed, and what it was before. The place that helped shape you, taught you to drive, to bike, to work, to reinvent. You know it’s smells (factory cookies and spices, magnolia, that mossy river smell, honeysuckle.) 

You know its many faults and its hidden magic. You wax poetic about bike trails that don’t exist anymore, you know the exact thrill of crossing a dicey cement bridge in Forest Hill Park. You know the secret back way to get onto the train trestle, if you were so inclined. You know where the tiny, forgotten cemetery is next to Bandy Field, you know what that back trail on Belle Isle¹ used to be and why it gives you the shivers. You know the best pizza, best coffee, best shops. You know you know you KNOW. 

And then you move across the country for a new life and after a year, you come back for a visit. Now you’re just a visitor and you’re surprised to discover that things kept happening even without you. 

First of all, how dare you. I mean! HOW DARE YOU keep changing and evolving and building and tearing down without me. How could you. Don’t you know who I am? 

But, here in Oregon, nobody knows who I am. They don’t remember me with glasses and braces and a rat tail haircut. They don’t remember me slinging popcorn at the Byrd Theatre in a flapper dress. They don’t know my Camel-smoking, leather jacket wearing art school persona. They don’t know my reinvention into a mountain biker and fitness nut. They don’t know my ex-husband or my sister or the street where I grew up. (Not in the Fan District but near enough to still be a city kid.)

And you know what? I love it. I love being a fresh new thing here. I can be anyone. There are zero preconceived notions about me out here in Oregon, nearly 3,000 miles away. I’m clean. I’m just whatever version of me arrived here three years ago, only slightly more physically damaged. I never, ever have to worry about running into my high school ex-boyfriend at the grocery store and I don’t have to scan the room in a public place before I talk shit about someone. (You know what I mean.)

Fred was really worried that I’d be horribly homesick but mostly I wasn’t. I certainly miss things and I really miss my people but mostly I’m okay. However, sometimes it sneaks up on me.

Not long ago I was puttering in the kitchen and Apple Music rando-played “Oregon Hill” by the Cowboy Junkies. If you don’t know it, this is a song about Richmond and the title is the name of a really cool old neighborhood there. The song hit me sideways so hard I had to sit down. I cried in that way you do when grief fully takes over, bent at the waist, all in. I missed my place and I missed belonging to a place, so badly. A place where I get all the references, a place that really knows me. A place where I’m known.

But, the song changes, you get up, wipe away the tears and go for a walk. It will pass.

1. This particular trail runs along the part of the island that served as a prison for Union soldiers during the American Civil War.