Greetings from a brick-lined apartment in the Nob Hill neighborhood of Portland, where I’m lying in bed with my leg elevated because A: it’s all the furniture I have and B: I did so much moving and walking and stair-climbing these last few days, my right ankle decided to swell up and hurt even though I don’t (think I) have an injury.
Yes, this means I signed a lease on a whim. (Again.) Portland is home, sweet home for the foreseeable future.
It’s strange to say I just got home, because I just left home, also. Three weeks back, I flew to Saint Augustine to surprise my mother for Thanksgiving, a precedent I set two years ago when I came back early for the holiday from Europe. (She was totally floored the second time, too.)
Saint Augustine is home to me, undeniably. I felt it as I flew toward it and as I walked down its streets, climbed the lighthouse that’s literally inked into my skin.
But I do also feel at home here in Portland: the endless mountain hikes in the gorge and the nearness of the coast and the ocean; the old friends who’ve been here for a while and the new ones it somehow seems so easy to make in this town. In the space of half an hour at the PDX airport, I chatted editing with a fellow writer (who’d seen my [citation needed] tattoo) and commiserated with the woman who locked eyes with me across the room when the loudspeaker asked for a child’s parents to come to the information center. Poor kid, we said. Probably terrified. But if there’s an airport to be lost in…
Portland is famous for its millennial-hipster-bubble mentality, like a whole city of hyper-woke hugboxing. It’s easy to make fun of — and a major cause of the mass influx of outsider residents Portland natives are so sick of. (Yes, I know I’m part of the problem.)
But Portland’s brand of overarching progressivism is incredibly attractive to young people who feel displaced or isolated; who feel too queer or too loud or too big or too crazy. It feels like license to build the world we want, to be whoever we want. I know I feel like I can be whatever I want here. And being around the kinds of people who want to genuinely connect with strangers over tattoos or lost children makes me want to be a better person.
Still, there’s the problem of home, especially as someone who’s so itchy-footed so frequently. Where is home, anyway? What is it?
This is certainly not the first time I’ve dealt with this home question — having done so much travel, I’ve often said I’m always homesick for somewhere. And there’s truth behind that oft-LiveJournaled line from Garden State about how growing up is the same as become homesick for a place that ceases to exist. The feeling of ease and grounding and stability that come with (a privileged) childhood, that warmstomach feeling marked by old stuffed animals or Christmas presents under the tree or, in my case, one’s parents screaming unintelligibly at football games. I never gave a shit about sports myself, but to this day, having a football game on in the background somehow feels grounding.
But maybe losing that version of home doesn’t mean losing home entirely. Maybe there are different kinds of homes, different phases: the home where you grew up, the way its slants of light and streetcorners are mingled with your very earliest, most fundamental memories, terror and joy and shame. The home where you were a young adult, where you learned who you were — and who you wanted to become. The home(s) where you’ll always be on a first-name basis with the streets, no matter how long you leave for.
Maybe for you, all these homes are one place. But maybe you can have more than one home.
Maybe you can have dozens.
Saint Augustine Beach, FL
Saint Augustine Beach, FL
The Bridge of Lions – Saint Augustine, FL
Nights of Lights – Saint Augustine, FL
Tolomato River – Ponte Vedra, FL
Saint Augustine Lighthouse – Saint Augustine, FL
Saint Augustine Lighthouse – Saint Augustine, FL
Portland, OR