For most of my life, I’ve felt safer and more at home in a train station or an airport or a hotel than the (many) different rental apartments I’ve made my home.
When we moved into this apartment, despite no concrete plans to relocate again, it took me four months to commit to buying (my second) sofa, eight months to buy curtains, and a year to buy a bedside table.
There are boxes in the cellar that I still can’t get around to unpacking. I still can’t quite believe that we will stay.
My mother calls this “itchy butt syndrome” and I wonder how much of it is genetic. After all, all my (male) ancestors were sailors that couldn’t sleep unless their bed was rocking - and not just in a sexual way. They loaded ships in Southern China and unloaded ships in Myanmar, Thailand, Cuba, New York decades before I was born, before my dad signed his first contract that included allowances for relocation services, country club membership, and international school tuition.
Pre-, and even post-9-11, my parents would regularly put my sibling and I on flights alone to Vietnam, China, Laos, and the United States as unaccompanied minors, to be caught on the other end by ambiguously related relatives or family friends we’d never even met.
We had matching little green canvas Samsonite rollies with brown leather details that we were responsible for packing by ourselves. I can remember counting out how many pairs of socks I would need for a trip to Hawaii, stopping over in Japan, when I was five, and thinking about what I would wash in the hotel bathtub, what could reliably dry overnight. We weren’t allowed to carry any more than we could lift independently.
I have called more places home across four/five continents than I care to count. Despite being very into people, and very open to falling in love, I have never been in a long-distance relationship, because I know I can’t. I can’t explain how I know. I just do. So all of this applies to me, not you. If you successfully make long-distance work, that’s great and I love that for you.
Cómo te quiero y te quiero, pero este amor ya no es mío
Sé que tu boca y mi boca, cuando se juntan, hay lío
Cómo quisiera quedarme, pero ahora no estás conmigo
Sé que la vida se pasa, pero no pasa contigo
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