The Caveat of Coming Home

And the key to staying young

After the whirlwind of a year— from uprooting to California to an emergency landing in the South Pacific, from driving with a stranger along the east coast of Australia to falling in love with Costa Rica, from begrudgingly leaving Santa Teresa and then flying back only to break my hand, from my sister’s beautiful wedding day to a changing season of creature comforts— I was suddenly boomeranged back into my old life and was uncertain where to take my next aim.

So when I came across the Nomad Cruise, still accepting applications and taking place one week after my temp job was to end, I took it as a sign. These annual conferences host over 250 digital nomads, entrepreneurs, and remote workers from all over the world on a 12-day cruise. This one would cross the Atlantic from Barcelona to Brazil, stopping in Gibraltar, Tenerife, and Cape Verde along the way.

Visiting three continents in two weeks felt too good to be true. Still, I was torn. I had only been home for a few months. In which time, I had thrown my sister’s bachelorette and wedding shower, and stood, a bubbling brook, beside her as she said, “I do.”

I received a visit from Mel, a new friend I had met in Australia and never expected to see again so soon. I nailed a temp job at Comcast with the option to extend. I endured emotionally-charged, uncomfortably imperative conversations with friends and family members.

I had sleepovers with my 92-year-old grandmother, who suffers from dementia and yet would whisper buried stories from beneath the covers about the flowers in her childhood garden and the way my grandfather would sneak into bed after jazz gigs and weave his fingers inside hers. How they slept holding hands for sixty-odd years. I had noticed the way she rested on her back with her palms facing up. I assumed it was a religious thing, an offering to God, or an open acceptance of His offerings in return for her prayers.

My heart ached when I learned the truth. Eight years after my grandfather’s passing, she was still waiting for him to come home.

Coming home. How quickly I was reminded of the ease of basecamp, no longer living out of a suitcase.

I was witnessing my sister, with whom I had always been on such a similar page, now progressing what felt like lightyears beyond me. I envied and admired her stability, her marriage, her interior design projects, her sidewalk treasures, her dogs, her pool, every single throw-pillow and home-cooked meal that materialized her careful curation.

Still, the lack of freedom and spontaneity of settled-life terrified me.

I had spent twenty-odd years in the same small town. I had traced the rural roads a thousand times over. I could drive them with my eyes closed. I knew each line better than the imprinted pattern on the palms of my hands. But unlike my palms, they held no clear-cut future. Only a past.

I couldn’t look at a single landmark without conjuring up a memory. I couldn’t go to the bar without seeing someone I knew. I couldn’t sit at the lighthouse without thinking of that friend or the guilt I still carried for enabling her mental illness in attempts to disable her from feeling different, or crazy, or alone.

I couldn’t drive past the house owned by the parents of the first person I ever loved without thinking of the things I lost inside.

I couldn’t sit undistracted at the town beach, a beach that felt so big in my mind, that held so much space, and yet, somehow, I could walk its entire shoreline in under a minute.

The soiled memories, sunken like sediment around the perimeter of Our Club. The bathhouse we stalked like vermin. Cusping teenage boys and girls riding broken bikes around town, jumping off branches into black rivers full of leeches. How they’d untie our bikinis when we weren’t looking to catch a glimpse of our flat, unformed chests. The voyeurism, and the stale smell of Curve on our pillowcases. How we’d shove our faces against the cloth to covet one last whiff. How we’d stick out our tongues to practice.

The notes passed. The secrets spread. The cheap sound of our tight click. Until we all grew up and realized we had nothing in common besides those memories on that beach.

The same beach where, a decade later, my father followed me and a girlfriend after midnight. His shadowy figure startled us under the buzzing streetlight until we heard his timid voice. “Can I join?” he asked of our night-swim, the same way I had asked my sister so many times in our youth. The same way he had asked his older brother growing up. Who knew three small words could hold so much depth, or mean so much more?

“Can?” Love

“I?” me

“Join?” as I am.

I couldn’t move back into my childhood home without being reminded of how clumsily I stumbled into adulthood. How clumsily I still stumble. I remember the three of us lying on the raft that night. The sky was so dark and the ocean, stiller than I had ever seen — our moon, nowhere to be found — and I realized how connected everything was. We listened to my father’s revelation over the drone of crickets and the calm slapping of water against wood.

“I feel like a kid again,” Russell said, as if our night out had transported him back to his teenage years as a lifeguard on a beach, two towns over. He explained the way you never really feel like an adult. How you never really have all, if any of the answers. All you have is a growing pain, a disillusionment, a deepening apprehension that time never stops and, while speedbumps of today appear much smaller in the rearview, they never stop coming. So, even when the road is flat, proceed with caution, drive slow, or else you’ll miss the rest of the world outside your window.

If only we could move backward, to carry the awkward wisdom of our old age into the frivolousness of childhood.

For the first time in my life, relaying my age surprised even my own ears. I remember a time when everyone around me was older. I was the youngest daughter, the youngest cousin on both sides, one of the youngest in my class, and the youngest of my friends.

I liked the idea of being the youngest, of being young. But now, one year shy of thirty, suddenly I’m not so young anymore.

Being home eased the relentless restlessness inside my soul, or at least numbed me of it. I was, in a nutshell, back in my nutshell and I was fine. Just fine. Not bad but boy, that’s never been good enough.

I weighed the pros and cons of staying at Comcast versus boarding a cruise with 300 strangers, where I would miss Thanksgiving for the first time ever, and be dropped off in Brazil without knowing the language besides a few phrases Grandma Lydia taught me, like boa noite and use sua cabeça and vergonha, which means “shame girl” because how could I possibly leave the house with so many holes in my jeans? Vergonha.

The year had catapulted me into a whole new world of Yes. A world that I never knew existed. Or else, I knew it existed, had an inkling anyway — could hear its incessant rustling with my ear pressed against the door — but I never held the key to get in.

Until I checked my pockets.

I had no idea what to expect from this cruise and that terrified me, but not as much as the thought of never finding out.

And now, as I write exactly one year later, with the knowledge of what was to come on that boat, in my life, to the entire world, halted by a national pandemic, I finally understand the only way to stay young, to be present, and make memories.

Spontaneity. The fluid movement of it. The input and the outcome. The adrenaline. The fear. The fight, not flight. The anything but sitting on your couch. The nights you got up and out. Of swimming in cold water. Of diving into darkness. Letting it surface, submerge, and surround you. The wonder of opening your eyes. Of seeing nothing. Something. Of seeing it all.

Most lives are a string of forgettable days strung on a string of forgettable slack. Give yourself something to hang.

Wet clothes weigh heavy on my line.