On recent birthdays, it’s been hard not to feel a bit behind. At my age, my parents had been married for 5 years. My sister had her first kid or two. Most of my friends are married and working on kid #1, 2 or 3. Or at least they have a masters, M.D, or career to brag about. (I had a career, but it just made me feel more behind.)
I have nearly all brilliant moments of clarity while driving (which is why I write about so few of them–they melt before I can catch them.) and this birthday I was listing to some dumb, emotionally-manipulative song on my shuffle, and I came up over the rise and saw the valley and the hills spread out in front of me and had my brilliant moment of clarity: I realized how much i loved those hills. The sky, the sweep, the green and grey and blue. I will be homesick for this place. I will long for it when I am away from it. In all likelihood, I will miss my next two birthdays here, the next two springs and falls and summers and winters, possibly 3 Christmases depending on how it’s counted. I will be 30 before I come home again. That is a very long time.
In six months, you adjust your habits. You make a list of Things You Miss. That list becomes the Things You Are Waiting For. You make a list of Annoyances which becomes the list you are waiting to abandon. You learn, you love, you tether but only as much as is required, because in half a deep breath, you’ll be home.
Two years will change you. I imagine the list of Things You Miss will be divided into two lists: Things You Can Do Without, and Things For Which You Must Find Acceptable Substitutes. One of the things I missed in indonesia was my beauty. I just had to hold out a few more weeks of frizzy hair and greasy skin and I would be home with my products and flat irons and creams and soaps and makeup and esthetician. I can wait out six months. In two years, I will have to build a new identity. In two years, I will find new things to love–I will have to. When I landed in Indonesia, I told myself, “This is where I live now. This is what my life looks like. This is what it smells like. This is what it requires. This is what it is lacking. This is just the way it is.” And i believed it as strongly as I six months required me to. Two years will require me to believe it completely, and as close to permanently as can be humanly perceived.
I was driving to my interview, on my birthday, with the hills and the sky and the dumb song and the longing. I didn’t feel behind. I felt centered. Exactly where I would have chosen to be if given the choice. Not as though my life were beginning sometime after the next few birthdays. Not as though, “with any luck” I’ll be somewhere completely unrecognizable this same time next year. Because This. Was. My. Luck. By this day next year I WILL be somewhere completely unrecognizable. Possibly without electricity or toilets.
I’ve been afraid most of my life, and I have only just recently come to realize how many decisions I have made out of a desire to not be afraid anymore. It has come to the point that I do not distinguish between feelings of fear and excitement anymore. Because fear, when defeated, gives way to joy. To my heart, they are one and the same. When something terrifies me, I run to it. (or I try.) This–this thing that I am doing now–terrifies me. The last time I was this terrified was the last time I was in love, and this feels the same. My (very very handsome) interviewer asked if I’d had any major life changes in the past year–big breakups, deaths, career changes, etc. I laughed a little as my head played me a video montage of two years ago. He wanted to know if I was fleeing from anything. And I had been. When i submitted my first application, I was fleeing for my life. But then I fled. And then I came home. And now, without needing to flee, in my calmest, most serene, most terrified self, I still want to do this.
Around my birthday two years ago, I decided that I wanted to become the kind of person who Does Things, instead of the kind of person who talks about doing things. I have come to abhore the person who talks about doing things because he is so attractive and mysterious and interesting and false and he lives inside my head. It is so much easier to talk about doing things. Talk is cheap. Doing things will cost you birthdays and summers and green hills and three Christmases and friends and boyfriends, and one hundred thousand other things that I will not think of until I have already spent them. Doing things is expensive. But I look at the wedding photos and baby photos that make me feel behind and I know that they are expensive too, but no one regrets the cost–not really, not deeply and secretly. And neither will I. I feel, at last, at 28, that I am nearly caught up.
not all who wander 