I Finally Moved.
There is never a perfect time to start over.
Well, it’s been over a year and a half since I wrote to you all. I guess I have some explaining to do. You can read a bit more about what was taking over my life during that time here:
And here’s the rest of the story.
TLDR; In this newsletter, I tackle something I’ve been avoiding. Or, waiting for the right time to execute.
Mission: Move Out of Illinois
It would appear that I am only capable of moving states and homes when the world, or my world as I’ve come to understand it, is crumbling.
We first arrived in Champaign, Illinois as the invisible virus floated all around us. We drove from Miami to Illinois, only stopping to run into the rest stop bathrooms. We were so afraid of what those few minutes inside with someone in the stall next to us might do to us. We ate sandwiches from our cooler in a gas station parking lot across from a corn field—staring at the rolling green sea while we chewed.
Arriving in that town felt like being granted freedom. We’d left a major city for a much smaller ZIP code—one with much fewer cases and deaths. Existing felt more manageable. We went to parks and set off on hikes where we were the only people walking for miles. We were playing house in our 350-square-foot home made of cards. Every day, I edited stories about the right way to wear a mask, or studies about the effectiveness of surgical ones versus N95s, and so many vaccine trials. Then I’d log off and pray for it all to end—even if it meant my job would disappear. It would not be the last desperate plea I would make from this place. I dreamed a lot then about what “one day” would look like. About what I’d do once I had my first dose, then my second, then my third. I knew exactly what I wanted, I’d always had.
We’d go for these long, meandering walks then, down the street behind our apartment building. There was a corgi who’d greet us at one set of tall gates. There were yellow wildflowers and little libraries, and jack-o-lanterns half-melting into the crevices on porches. There was one morning before work where the torrential rains of spring came pouring down on us, and we ran all the way home. I laughed so hysterically the whole way back my stomach hurt. Then it was a hot shower and back to my computer to reunite with those virus stories.
The day I drove to get my first dose, I played Good Days by SZA over and over on my drive there and back and let it hang around me like an amulet. In the evening, the lymph node by my neck blew up into the size of a golf ball. I rocked back and forth for hours in excruciating pain, that I would one day come to realize, after a fateful Japanese Breakfast concert, was only a mere fraction of what it would feel like to actually have the virus. I knew to expect this reaction, we’d written so many stories about it. The doctors said to tough it out. I remember now thinking at the time, that the knowing didn’t make it any less scary.
After the waiting, and the following shots, it felt like a world wide open. We moved to a bigger house ten minutes away. I should’ve been deliriously happy to have two floors and two white french doors that led outside to a yard. But I could only see a neighborhood with less charm; homes that all looked cut from the same cardboard; empty, echoing rooms with grey rugs and not enough furniture to fill them; and no one to share dinners with. I know G wanted me to be happy about it. I wanted to give that to us both. And I would, one day—in spurts.
The reality was I didn’t want to spend my early 20s in a place as sleepy and remote as Champaign. Who would? I’d just spent four years discovering a world that delighted me: one full of art, where you could walk out of your apartment with just your wallet and a plan to see where your legs ended up taking you, and late nights with friends dancing out in the city. Then nothing but cruel fate ripped it away in exchange for house arrest. Once there was no real excuse to be inside anymore, I was left looking around and wondering: Could it really just be us two out here? Would we make it?
We would. Over the next four years, I fell in love with so many pockets of this place. The long stretches of expansive green fields against crisp blue skies you could almost swim in. The willow trees I’d lay under by the ponds of the Japanese gardens—and the beavers I’d watch scurry out from the water. The drive-in theater we had to drive 30 minutes through farmland to get to—and the “chilly dilly” intermission ad we memorized. Those doors that led to my yard propped open on hot days. The yelling of the kids playing sports at the nearby school while I typed away at my computer. The local pool we’d go to practically every day in the summer—always after 4 p.m. so we’d pay the discounted rate of $7. One afternoon, as the wildfire smoke rolled in from Canada and a haze clogged up the sky, we floated on our backs round and round and wondered why the sky was blurry. We floated anyway. My local library, where I’d choose a new-to-me artist to obsess over—like Joni Mitchell and James Baldwin—and study everything they’d ever done. The pottery studio in the basement of the culture center where I often left with clay in my hair. The part grocery store/part café we had breakfast at nearly every Saturday morning. Then I got to see all my favorite places through my friends’ and family’s eyes when they visited. We had someone to share dinner with after all. And people willing to take a plane and a two-and-a-half hour car ride (or two planes) at that to get there.
There is no telling whether the decisions we made at the time were the right ones. We make choices with the information we have available to us in the moment. These days, I am grateful I had a few years removed physically from all the things I once might’ve let define me: work, a busy social life, family. Who was I with all of that stripped away, tucked in each of their faraway places? I think I found those answers. I used to spend a lot of time worrying about all those years I’d never get back. It’s really why I wrote this newsletter in the first place. It started as an effort to fight back against my preoccupation with perfect timing. I’m not so preoccupied with that anymore.
But like all places you don’t choose, I outgrew it, and much too early before our eventual departure. What was supposed to be four years, turned into five. It was agonizing, seeing this predictable existence stretch out before me for an additional calendar year than I’d mentally prepared for. When I found out, I yelled in the car on the way to pottery class. I started wearing my azabache everywhere, paranoid that someone might be haunting me with their mal de ojo. Surely, someone else had to be responsible. I could not, once again, be at the whims of fate, science, and failed experiments. Then, I spent a year writing my way out of desperation. I wrote about a warmer place, my hometown, complicated as it may be. The world finally started to make sense. Only being so far from that home of mine could help me see it all with such clarity.
Now, the country is crumbling again. I’ve unlocked deeper levels of fear and panic I wasn’t aware existed inside of me. I’m having sobering conversations about the endless churn of a repetitive history. I am sad that my parents are facing down something that reminds them of the things they fought hard to leave behind. This time, it will be different, we tell ourselves. I’m not so sure. How simple of me to have once thought, just because I wanted it to be so, that I would be spared from having my own similarly painful stories.
And then it was time to pack our boxes, empty the house's rooms once more, fill one big metal container with all the remaining proof that we once built a life here together, and ship it off to Brooklyn. A dream finally realized. Couples came and toured the house to take it from us. I tell them about how much I loved the back door and propping it open during the summer. I hope they’ll open it too. They looked so eager to take our place. You’ll love it here, I told them, and I’m not sure it was a complete lie.
On a scale of waiting for the right time to facing my dread, I would say there is never a perfect time to start over.
ohhh she’s back! so much joy and hope and sorrow and uncertainty to unpack, i love reading your writing 💛