As a child I was always the one who stayed.
I stayed as all around me, others went. Kids I played with moved away and left behind lonely empty houses. My parents, unlike theirs, were content where they were, and not the sort to leave.
The problem was, I was always getting attached to people in my neighborhood – kids, their dogs, or the elderly couple who always offered pink lemonade.
They won my heart and then they left. I imagined the exotic faraway places where they must have gone, places where everything was better. Otherwise, why would they go?
Even as an adult, I have mostly stayed in the town where I was born. I moved only once to spend a year in Atlanta during the Dot Com Bubble of the nineties.
I was unhappy.
Throngs of people crowded the stores and streets, and towering buildings grazed the clouds. It seemed that the bigness of things was what attracted people to the city, like the self-important skyscrapers, the imposing CNN Center, or the over-hyped Coca Cola Museum.
The more I thought people expected me to gawk at the relevance of the big city, the more determined I was not to be impressed with it.
It was only after I returned to my home town that I remembered what I had liked about Atlanta: the lights of the city at night, the amazing ethnic restaurants, the indie movie theaters, even the ethnic mix – I noticed how uniformly white everyone in my home town was when I returned, a sea of pale bored faces.
During all of my complaining about my new home, something had happened beneath my awareness. Atlanta had quietly changed me, and I could never view anything in the same way again.
Back at my old house, I was glad to be home, and this made me think that, like my parents, I was not the sort who moved away, but the sort who stayed.
Since then, I have stayed for 13 years.
I imagined I would always be here, going places only in my head, reading or writing, with my weeping willow tree in the back yard and all of the windows that give the living room a dreamlike radiance on sunny days.
But since I returned from Atlanta, a lot has changed. A layoff. A bad economy. A dismal job market.
Other states with better opportunities are pulling me away, and my home here will soon dissolve into a memory.
But I remember my mistake in Atlanta, how I had closed myself to all it had to offer when I could have drank it all in. Despite that, Atlanta had imprinted itself on me.
I thought I left Atlanta, but I took it with me, as a stowaway in my luggage. Because of that, I see now that I can leave the house behind – or any other place – and still keep it inside me when I go.
If I move, I want to do things differently this time.
I want to open myself to whatever a new place has to offer, no matter where it is, to take in all of its sights and sounds, to venture into the whirlwind of experience and get dizzy. And if it ever gets to be too much, I can come home again, to the place inside my head, and write.
I am not the person who stays anymore, but no one really is. Life is all about pausing and leaving, moving and being left. But I will never leave completely, no matter where I go.
My attachments to people will stay, and so will the years of experience here that have made me who I am.