Home is where the stomach tells you that it is

Why does it always happen that just when you threaten to leave a place, you start to feel more at home than ever before? What is it about the act of turning to move on that highlights every wonderful thing you'd be leaving behind?

Yeah, that's my big secret. I've been thinking quite a bit about heading home (which is causing me to see LA a little rosy-tinted, but that is for another post). It's a secret, because I always leave space to change my mind as new information arrives, and what if I tell you all, and then I don't go home? Oh well.

I can't go yet, I have a bunch of inter-state license wrangling to do, but the idea of going back to Seattle keeps surfacing, strongly, whenever I'm in a period of massive transition. I felt this way in Berkeley four years ago, but missed SPU's application deadline by 9 days. I didn't want to wait a year to start grad school, so I decided to go to LA "just for two years, then I'll go home." Four years later, I'm still here.

I guess, on some level, I just want to be somewhere that when everything else in life changes (as it probably will always continue to do, every few years), I don't think about taking off. I can't promise myself that home would be that place, but I'm getting closer to wanting to take a chance that it could be (and hey, if not, I seem to be on four-year cycles, so I'm taking suggestions for 2014). I don't want to start over, personally or professionally. And I have no regrets that I moved here, or that I stayed here for a boy, or that I then stayed here for myself. But I keep trying to get myself to decide to just keep staying, to call it home, and my stomach's not entirely OK with that (ever since I hit 30, my stomach is the place I feel it when my heart hurts). I'm nervous about taking a full-time job. I canceled plans to move that would require me to sign a lease. I'm happy here, for now, but when I think about a few years down the line, I don't know that LA is where I want to be.

I don't know what will happen in the next six months. But whatever comes, the staying or going, the strange thing about all this is that it gives me a totally different perspective on, well, the source of the primary topic of my blog for the last year. When my heart was freshly broken, I couldn't understand when G said that there was nothing wrong, everything was "fine," but that he just couldn't go forward. Which sucked, because there wasn't really any way I could respond to that. But how I feel now, about LA, must be what he felt like. It's great, I'm happy, there are a number of really amazing things in Los Angeles that I couldn't get anywhere else. Sure, it's far from perfect, but I've gotten used to its quirks. I would even say (who thought this day would ever come?) that I love LA. But I can't commit. I can't promise I'll be here in the future. I'm trying to tell myself to just stay and be happy, because that would be a lot easier than starting over. And if I felt it, in my stomach/heart, that would be different. But it's just not what I want. It's not personal. It's not even about LA itself; hell, a lot of people would be lucky to live here and call it home. It's just about what feels like home to me. I can date this city, introduce it to my friends, bring my parents to meet it, play house, make a life here with it. But if push came to shove, if LA needed to know where my heart really was, I don't think I could pretend that I didn't sort of always have one toe out the door.

Well, I could lie, but then it might find out that in August, I picked a Google Voice number in area code 206.

Day 3

Dear Diary,
Today was Day 3 of unemployment in LA. Today is The Day I Did Not Get Out Of My Pajamas. I figure everybody needs one of those.

But I think one is plenty.

Dear Diary

Dear Diary,
Today is my first day of unemployment in LA. I got up and went for an early morning bike ride. With Lance Armstrong. Then I came home and ate leftover birthday cake for breakfast. Now I'm going back to bed.

I think this is going to work out just fine for a little while.

julie