Growing Older And Going Home

Around this time last year, I decided I would move from Somerville, Massachusetts to New York City. This departure, from a town I loved to a city I needed, was an immense shift—so much so that I would first have to move home, to the house I grew up in. During my final months in Somerville, summer slowly rose to the occasion around me. Distracted by the bloom, I hardly noticed as the roots wound around my ankles, insisting that I stay.

Those roots, I knew, were thin and unspecific to me. The greater Boston area, built on universities, induces a grounding, though temporary, effect on many. I could angle my ankle and the roots would break. Still, I was inclined to let them hold me in place.

Laying on my stomach, my laptop overheating before me, I looked up at my therapist’s face on the screen, who had just asked what was holding me back.

I was worried about going home.

I knew, I told her, from weekends and summers back from school, that going home would require facing younger versions of me—younger versions that I did not like.

The hills would grow in height and familiarity and I’d fall into the fatigue that defined 16. I’d sense the turns of the closest roads and the impatience of 18 would accompany them. The cars would be suddenly fewer, the trees increasingly dense, and I would be angry like 20.

I hated taking on these traits again. No matter how many times I morphed and moved, the four walls of my childhood bedroom had stayed the same, holding all of the memories that I worked so hard to forget.

Today, I woke up between them.

The window of my childhood bedroom looks onto the backyard, framing a spectrum of green. From the manicured lawn to the tops of the trees, there’s not one spot without pigment. The color is overwhelmingly different from the gray I face daily in Manhattan.

As soon as I close my eyes, I hear the birds. Dozens of birds.

I woke up between these walls, on this bed, on thousands of consecutive mornings. I don’t recall ever hearing the birds.

I turn from that great green picture to face the rest of the room. I watch as my bed shifts to all of the positions I had impulsively moved it to before—the years that it spent on the floor, once in the corner, once in the center. Forgotten friends arrive and leave. Clothes, mostly unworn, and books, all unread, pile up and disappear again. The light changes with the seasons, but always feels the same. And there, always there, me. At 13, at 16, at 18, at 20.

As I watch her grow up, there is a new distance between us. With some space, I can see her without feeling like I will suddenly be her. I don’t turn away from her implications.

Instead, I run my fingers through 16’s hair. I know that she is so tired. I straighten as 18 sits down, but her eyes hardly rise. I know she’s terrified. I stay turned toward 20, despite her anger, for I know that she’s scared, too.

22 is here now, and she’s closer. I feel the weight that she carried into adulthood. I reach out to squeeze her hand. And 23, in those few weeks between Somerville and New York. Apprehensive, but curious. She spent so much time laying on her stomach, looking up at that screen, deciding who she wanted to be. To fear taking on their traits. To not like them? Sure, I’d encourage them all to drink a little more water or to just write it all out (for the love of God), but I would never now be able to look at these girls, all as young as I ever was, and want to look away.

I am not a result of leaving them behind. They were all pieces of this arrival.

Now, settled, I can hear the birds. And later, I’ll take a walk down the street as I now love to do, along the creeks and past the barns. And maybe I’ll stop, distracted by their song and the green and the breeze. When I look down, there are roots wrapped around my ankles again. These ones, thick and old and sure.

I wonder how I got away with going so many years without seeing all of this beauty. It was holding me all along.