For better or worse, the places where you grow up get under your skin. A city that may be no more than a stopping place for a parent becomes drenched with meaning for you, their child, for it’s the place where you learned how to be. To the untrained eye your hometown might not seem like much more than a heap of telephone wires and crepe myrtle bushes—certainly you know now there are more exciting places to live—but for awhile, or maybe always, the place you grew up is the truest place you know.

I keep trying to grasp what makes a place feel like home but the specifics keep slipping through my fingers. Is it simply the abundance of memories? Or the most vivid place you felt secure and loved? Or the place where your younger self is forever memorialized? Or maybe a combination of all three, plus a little intangible extra? My family moved around enough during my formative years that I dreamed wistfully of growing up in a small town where everyone knew each other, a la Stars Hollow. What would it be like to have so much shared history in a place? I lamented the bonds that grew brittle with every move. But I had to have roots somehow; even though I was twelve by the time we moved to Oklahoma, it’s still the place I thought of as home for thirteen years.

Last week I traveled back to that hot, beautiful state to help my sister move to Michigan. Lurking on every street corner were ghosts of former lives lived, tantalizingly close but made elusive by the veil of time. We were here and we mattered, they whispered. In the afternoon, when everything was crystallized in a slick of shimmering heat, Mimi and I visited the pool we used to frequent. We treaded water and romanticized the naive people we used to be. Now that our parents have moved overseas, we wistfully realized Oklahoma doesn’t feel like home anymore. Cliche as it is, home isn’t home without your people, and in their absence we are having to learn new ways to be ourselves.

Is it a loss of identity we’re grappling with, or is it just growing up? It’s easy to think of the past as the way things should always be.

Longing happens in the gut. I know this because when when I walk the neighborhoods in the evening and I smell someone else’s dinner cooking and hear the sophisticated clink of cutlery on porcelain it feels like a sucker punch. From the windowpanes radiates a family in a glow cast wide enough to illuminate something I’m missing. I can’t decide if I’m fantasizing about being a parent or a child. 

I know I want to be a mother someday—I want the chaos of family dinners, the skinned knees and sticky skin, the curiosity of souls that are simultaneously their father’s and mine and their own. I want to be sealed together as a family. But the thought also terrifies me. I know that once I push a baby from my body there will be no turning back. Am I strong enough to make such enormous sacrifices, both physically and mentally? “You’re scared because you care,” Rachel tells me. She had a baby last fall, a button-eyed cherub named Saili. “It’s all so worth it. You are stronger than you think.” I can tell from the certainty in her voice that she’s discovered this strength within herself too.

utah on film, 2019

Our love was built on winding roads and daring vistas. Fate came in the form of a jeep and the open road kept us together, my hand on the back of his neck and his hand on my thigh. We were the only two inhabitants on a planet created just for us. A tent became our sanctuary. Blustery cliffs were an excuse to hold each other close. Every sunset was a poem.

Perhaps we continue to choose these trips as a bridge to our beginnings. On the road we slip into a special kind of synchrony. We are a team, searching for meaning in every rock and rutted road. How soothing it is to leave behind household drudgeries and remember what it was like before we took each other for granted. I could be 18 again, bursting with love and wonder, forgetting how to eat or sleep.

Life keeps delivering blow after blow. If there really is a balance between good and bad, we’re due to win the lottery soon. My sister’s therapist says to allow ten minutes each day to indulge in pure, seething rage. I try it. Annoyingly, I still find upsides everywhere. Things could be worse, I think. Black mold in our apartment deepens our friendships. Living so far from family makes us prioritize each other more. Stress strengthens our marriage. I just want to be mad.

I don’t understand the point, I lament to my sister. One day, Mimi agrees, we’ll look back on this year and wonder how we got through it. 

Maybe life can’t be quantified into neat equations. Sometimes bad things just happen and there’s no upside. Still, I have to believe that things sort themselves out eventually, at their own pace and in their own way. My husband is suspicious of a cosmic plan. But how else could I carry on?