The Long Way Home

During Deborah's recent hospital stay—between the beeping, diarrhea, and medical team huddles—I had a lot of time to think.

I realized something. My whole adult life has been an exercise in searching for home.

What kept replaying in my mind was the drive I made three decades ago that took me away from my childhood home for good.

As I made my way to Austin to begin my first job out of college, I felt the heaviness of what seemed like a moment of exile. It filled me with a homesick ache.

I pulled my car off I-35 in Dallas, my overstuffed cream-colored Nova coasting into the emptiness of a parking lot in the city notorious for being a concrete jungle. I sat quietly staring out my windshield into a blue, unfamiliar sky. 

My fingers were wrapped around the steering wheel. I looked down at them—long, lean, olive-skinned, tan—and they pulled me back in time. 

These were the same hands that once curved around a basketball as if it were made for me, and brushed the red stitches of a baseball before stepping up as the lone girl in the all-boys Pitch-Hit-Run competition—my dad’s applause echoing like a drumbeat of pride. And these were the hands that, years earlier, clung to the cold metal of a grocery cart, eyes darting frantically between the cookie aisle and the fresh produce in search of my mom. 

That childhood panic flooded back to me, the way reality can tilt without warning. One moment you’re safe, the next you’re clutching a stranger’s shopping cart full of canned white potatoes and teetering bottles of white wine, confused and desperate to find the one person you trust.

My fingers tightened on the steering wheel. My chest heaved forward, and a sound tore out of me—half-sob, half-muffled scream; a quiet indication of what was building inside of me. The urge to fling the car door open and run was overwhelming, though I had no idea where I’d go in this massive city I’d never been in before. The thought that shattered me was no longer just a thought but a truth pressing into every vein: I’ll never live at home again, will I, God? 

The answer was brutal. 

I dropped my forehead to the middle of the steering wheel and screamed through an exhale that lasted way too long and made my shoulders ache. When all the breath and sound had left me, I leaned back against the seat, sobbing, begging:  Why? Why me? I never wanted to leave them. Why did you make me this way? 

I knew my “difference” would wound the people I loved most. And the only way I could think to protect them—from my truth and their disappointment—was to leave. I hated that exile felt like my only option. Under a vast Dallas sky, the tears fell fast, the kind of tears that don’t just sting but that split you open. 

When there was nothing left, I relaxed my grip, dried my eyes, put my car in drive, and continued south, further away from everything familiar.

Over the first few years after I’d moved away, the people in my life who knew just how homesick I was, and how very much I loved my family, would say, “You’re so strong to be so far away from the people you love so much.” They couldn’t see the fractures, the million tiny crevices inside me where, in a closed system of heartbreak, the pain flowed and recirculated with no escape.

I had always been trapped in a version of myself I couldn’t quite name but had always known was real. As a teenager, I prayed it would take a lifetime to reveal itself.

But in college, Kate’s kiss broke it free, and it came forth with a vengeance. There was no more fooling myself about who and what I was. 

I knew then I could never go home again, not because of where I’d been or what I’d done, but because of who I am. 

Though time doesn’t always heal, it does smooth out the jagged edges of the pain we create for ourselves. Under the pale Chicago sky, while Deborah and Vinny stole slivers of uneasy sleep between their sickness, I was carried back to that vacant Dallas parking lot. Back to the homesickness that hollowed me out. Back to the thought—the lie, really—that my family could never hold all of me. I never gave them the chance. I just left.

In the absence of my writing over the past few months, I’ve been grappling with a desire that has required me to think creatively about my living situation.

As a nester, I love having a home base with my unique style, choreographed comfort, and creative expression. However, I’ve felt pulled in two directions around the two places I call home. 

I bought my condo in Austin when permanence felt like a kind of progress. It was my stake in the ground—a declaration that I belonged to something, again—the Texas city I once called home for 18 years until I fled to Seattle for love and a cooler (on all levels) life. 

Replanting myself in the fastest-growing city in the country, after eight years in the Pacific Northwest, was full of promise that this stint would take root and be even grander than the first. After all, I moved cross-country again for love, and this time that love came with longevity.

I made my life in Austin beautiful. In my condo, I built a haven of warmth, art, and sunlight. It has held me through seasons of joy and steadied me in seasons of hardship. Nestled among the trees, it gave me space to listen inward—to uncover my voice, perhaps for the first time. And here, too, I found a love with Deborah that grounds me even as it lifts me, giving me both anchor and wings.

But time, as it does, kept whispering about aging parents, about my big, boisterous family setting dinner tables without me. 

I ran the numbers. (I always do.) Income, equity, appreciation, mortgage. All the math. 

Those numbers said, “You’re doing fine here.” 

But the voice that lives just below the spreadsheets said something else, “You’re being called closer. You’re being called home.” 

Not just to family, but to even more freedom and a deeper connection. 

Not just so I can dive into the nostalgia of remembering, but to create new memories because some of the cast of characters won’t be around much longer. 

Besides, I wouldn’t be leaving Austin; I’d be creating a hybrid living where I would be in both places at different times of the month/year. Deborah and I would finally engage in the bi-city living we dreamt about when we started dating, back when I was in Seattle and she was in Austin. 

It might mean trading the extremes of Austin’s summer heat for Kansas City’s bitter winter, yet doing it for the lightness of a leash in my hand as I walk my precious Vinny through the streets on quiet KC mornings, where family is just around the corner and a few miles down the highway rather than 800 miles up one. 

The same road that carried me away would now carry me back—not to the house I left, but to the family I never stopped belonging to.

In that Dallas lot, I was convinced I’d never return home again. It turns out, I was just taking the long way back.