Chasing Home

I’m getting on a plane today, but I am not going home.

That’s not to say that I’m not heading back to Birmingham, to my nice little two-bedroom apartment, to my two cats and two rats, where I live and work and play. Because I am. That is where I’m going. But Nathan’s flight leaves a few hours before mine lands, and thus I am not really going home. I am going to the place where home usually is, but in his absence will become a strange sort of in-between place, like a waiting room, or a boarding gate. Neither of those places is the destination- they’re just places you hang out while waiting to get to the destination. Or, in my case, while waiting for the destination to come back to me.

Years ago, while I was agonizing over whether to give up my life in the PNW to live in Birmingham and give a romantic relationship with Nathan a shot, Katie said to me something along the lines of, “Aren’t you tired of living in hotels? Don’t you just want to go home? Why would you keep living this way, going from temporary room to temporary room, when you could just take a chance and go home?” She wasn’t talking about my physical living situation: she was talking about my relationships. And she was right- I did want to go home. So I packed up my life and I went.

Today, however, I’m just going to Birmingham. And it’s not the same at all.