Returning to my childhood home feels almost sticky. Sweet with the Spooner Farms strawberries I ate throughout my childhood summers. The Juice Squeezes I drank at my parents parties, the of air of which always smelled with the rich tannins of red wine that constantly littered the counters and tables of my house, and still do. In cafes they sell the local soda that is unheard of on the East Coast in my new home city; my high school crush once took a photo that ended up on a label, it made my desire for him grow exponentially. He’s still dating a friend of a friend he took to prom senior year, according to Facebook.
Seattle makes me sad. It’s heavy with my past, and the overwhelmingly familiar. The woman who has been cleaning my teeth since elementary school still greets me at the dentist, her life seemingly unchanged over the past decade. My dentist who still makes me blush with his kind eyes the way he did when I was 16, though now I can actually meet his gaze. I take turns on autopilot down streets I could walk in my sleep. Life here is so much different than life in Boston. It’s so much quieter. The nostalgia is comfortable, but the reminders also make me nervous, worried about retreating into my 18-year-old self, which I will inevitably do after one week back in my old room.
Seattle feels removed from the rest of the country somehow, the way New England with it’s deep American history and proximity to New York and DC never will. It’s an alternate universe where not composting and recycling are punishable with a fine, as is j-walking, a law the police actually enforce. In Seattle even rioters and protesters wait for the light to change. Somehow even in the middle of downtown Seattle still feels like a small town, the person standing next to you on the corner feels like your neighbor. But I’d hate to demean Seattle by calling it quaint. We win Superbowls in Seattle; we build your airplanes and fuel your mornings with our coffee. You’ve used our computers, benefited from our knowledge. But we don’t ask you to recognize us, just to leave us alone in our quiet, green corner, forgotten above California.
Perhaps I could live here. I enjoy joining my parents at their dinner parties, visiting nice wine bars, and occasionally attending the symphony or the Repertory Theater. This is the life that shaped me to be the one now joking labeled ‘pretentious’ among my friends, paired with a hand motion of me swirling wine in an imaginary glass. My mother recently told me I wasn’t pretentious, I was knowledgeable, something I know my friends will only use as further proof of my ‘classy’ upbringing – which would probably make both my parents, who came from the bottom and paid their way through school, laugh. But I worry that my entire being might withdraw into autopilot as well. My mind doesn’t have to think too hard here, life is automatic, worn into me like muscle memory, just as I know to expect the dip in the road that makes my car shake back and forth as I turn onto 88th Street, and the menu of the neighborhood Thai restaurant is already memorized.
When I say I want to stay in Boston to finally settle somewhere, and stop moving every five months, I do mean it. Because I don’t feel I’ve yet reached the point of really breathing Boston the way I do with Seattle. Seattle I know, Boston I am somewhat acquainted with. I love coming home because it’s home, and it feels like that, and I know it will never change. My friendships here are solid, and last during the months between my visits until we can catch up again when I return once or twice per year. My Boston life is not quite there. I’ve not yet sucked everything out of Boston, and I’m curious about what it still might hold for me. I might never get there, but now is the time to try.
