Back home again

Richard and I went home to Bloomington, IN to spend Christmas with our families. Last year was the first time I’d ever gone home for the holidays since I’d always previously… already been home. And last December when we visited, it was over a year since we’d been back for our wedding, which all conspired to make it a very charming and very rosy trip. We were so nostalgic for our sweet, smallish university town and quite honestly spent a lot of the trip talking about what it would be like to move back. Things would be so much easier, so much cheaper, so familiar and family-ier.

This year, for some reason, a bit of the shine had worn off. It was pleasant, of course, and we loved spending time with our family and friends, but our feelings toward the town itself were dulled. Somehow it seemed to have both changed and stayed uninterestingly the same. There were plenty of differences, both good (new breweries! an upcoming technology park!) and bad (seriously, how many more apartment buildings can they build?). But for the most part it was the same old hometown we’d always known, and that included the same things that made us want to leave two and a half years ago.

We left because I had just finished my master’s and the job market in my chosen career was pretty slim in Bloomington. We left because Richard was tired of his job and the job market in his industry was also pretty slim there. We left because the town absolutely orbits the university, everything caters to students (try signing or getting out of a lease any month but August), and the students are literally everywhere, being young and irresponsible and stupid and loud and drunk and disrespectful and too damn plentiful and get the hell off my lawn.

But the most accurate reason we moved across the country from the only home I’ve ever known is probably “because it was time.” I felt like if I didn’t leave right then I might be there forever. There is an inertia that keeps you in place when things are going fine, when things are familiar and easy and nothing is so very wrong. Maybe your job isn’t perfect, maybe there are better places to live, but, hey, you’re here and the energy it would take to make a change doesn’t seem to be worth it.

And I think Bloomington is a great town, overall, and I’m not ruling out ending up there but I felt, deep down, that I had to experience another way of life before deciding to spend the entirety of mine a few miles from where I was born. I think it was absolutely the right decision, as hard as it was to make and as much effort as it took to make it happen. It seriously took a lot of effort, if you somehow get the impression that it wasn’t the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

But in the back of both of our minds, I think, we imagine returning one day to finally settle down. The date of that move fluctuates based on how much we love or hate California at the moment, but we talk often about what we might do when we move back, what part of town we’d live in, how much fun it would be to go to our favorite restaurants and be a part of a town we both still love. And so this Christmas, to be back in that environment and feel no strong pull to stay, no great desire to live there again, and in fact a twinge of… not repulsion, but a small yet sharp voice saying, “No, this is not for me,” was surprising and, frankly, scary. Our backup plan if the Great Californian Experiment failed was Bloomington, as was our medium-term When We’re Ready to Leave California plan. Without that as an absolute certainty I guess we’re… wide open.

Which is a bit terrifying. And a bit exciting.