On the inbetween
With deposit mailed and current bosses notified, I am fully commited to relocating to Boston this summer and beginning an English MA program in the fall. I couldn’t be more excited. My visit last weekend was a combination of laughing over pints of beer with old friends and meeting an impressive faculty who seem truly charmed that I have chosen to pursue study at UMass Boston when I could have gone elsewhere.
The university aside, it’s always been true that I could have gone elsewhere. Until very recently, I have never seriously considered living in Boston. It’s probably lost now, but I remember writing an entry in my journal one time when I was on a train, headed back to New York from a vacation in Portland, ME, my much beloved home town. The gist of the entry, or part of it, was that despite being in New York indefinitely, “my soul basically dwells in Portland.” I don’t remember that wording because I think it’s mind-blowing prose, but because it’s so true. I never considered myself of New York. In five years, I never got a New York drivers’ license. I never changed my voter registration. I never even got a local number for my cell phone. It was not always a conscious choice, but it was a choice, to remain an outsider. It is always easy enough to feel foreign in New York, so I did.
If it were as simple as all that, though, I would have just gone back to Portland. Going back has always appealed to me, comforted me, and it still does. But the other point of this old entry was my not quite fear, more like something nagging me, that if I did go back home, I would face an awful moment of truth and discover that irretrievable pieces of me were left in New York. The entry concludes, in what I recall was a bit of a mantra for me at the time, with writing off Boston, which I saw as an inbetween that was neither Portland nor New York.
There was a wall there that I just couldn’t think through, and I think I know what the problem was: I saw being a resident of one place or another as the ultimate expression of my identity. I can be urbane and cool when I want to, but sometimes it seems like a lot of work. It’s also true that I am close to my family and care about family history and traditions, but they don’t make much of a Saturday night. The poles change from person to person, but it turns out that my true self is where everyone else’s is, too: somewhere inbetween.