Countdown
One month from today, I'm moving to Singapore.
If you run into me in these next few weeks, you'll probably ask something about how the moving prep is going, and I'll probably express something positive about how steady work goes quickly or something. And now you know the lie of it; I'm even blogging to procrastinate from those very necessary preparations. Bless the Internet. You'll probably also say something about how exciting it is that we get to move to such a fantastic place; and I'll agree with you, and I truly do agree. There is a part of my heart and my brain that is very excited to live on the literal other side of the world for three years and meet new people and eat great food and see amazing places that I never thought I'd see without Anthony Bourdain narrating. That part of me is eager to go and procrastinates by looking at possible houses and condos in Singapore and planning weekend holidays all over Asia.
There is a part of me, as well, that's sad to leave my home, and I keep feeling swept back and forth between those two parts.
Growing up, I lived in six cities in four states over 18 years and attended eight different schools. My parents worked hard to make every transition as smooth as possible and to make each place home, but moving wasn't fun. It was hard to leave a place that had become at least familiar, and it was hard to get my footing in a new place. In my memory, that idiom suits the feeling of being new very well; new is a sea shore with big moss-covered rocks and unpredictable waves. Once I get used to the feeling of the slippery rocks, maybe figure out which ones are wobbly, clear my eyes from salt so I can watch for incoming swells, I know I'll be able to stand, but my feet keep slipping and there are several hard falls before everything gets sorted. Getting my footing in a new place was scary and hard, every time, but I was proud that I could do it. I wrote my college essay about how having moved made me adaptable and resilient, and I'm still proud that though I'm not sure I'm an outgoing person by nature, I know I can put on some pretty shoes, lock up the scared part of myself and go into a sea of new people pretending like I was born to stand on those slippery rocks.
I have known as long as I have had a choice, however, that I wanted to be a person with a place, and even more, I wanted my children to be the kind of secure, happy kids I saw looking back at me as an inviolate flock as I was introduced at the new kid; they had always known each other and knew who puked on the merry-go-round in pre-k, and they'd never have as much in common with this weird new girl. I would tell anyone that I didn't care where I ended up as long as I never, ever had to move again. So as an adult, I've pursued that goal. I've lived in my house for twelve years, which is seven years longer than I'd previously lived in any one house and four years longer than I've lived continuously in any state. My son has gone to the same school for seven years, which is four years longer than I attended any school. There's a guy at my grocery store (yes, MY store; of course I go to the same one regularly) who I've talked to nearly every week for fourteen years; his daughter was three when I first met him and now she's graduating from high school. I enjoy, daily, the kind of familiarity and continuity that I longed for growing up.
And now I'm leaving this dreamed-for home, willingly, and happily, in many ways. But, yeah, as a friend said when I told her, I'm kind of the last person you'd expect to do this.
To get a picture of my current mental state, please picture me in 1994, having undertaken move number six under heavy protest, sixteen years old, maximally nerdy, beflanneled even in the South in August, and completely devastated to have left the town where REM spawned and I myself knew actual people who had actually talked to Michael Stipe while thrifting, to come to a town without so much as a mall. That summer before my Junior year started I was fully in mourning for the life I had left behind, moping around with headphones on and my carefully horizontal Discman all but attached to my hand. Counting Crows was nearly my only playlist, and cringing, I can almost hear myself sing along in my new room, grocery stores, art museums. "Raining in Baltimore" was the emotional apex of the album for me, singing about missing someone and being morose in the rain, and when Adam would sing that his missing lover was "three thousand five hundred miles away" my voice would break every time as I oversang "four hundred sixty-two miles away," the distance I had calculated, in the days before Google Maps, between me and my friends and my places and the things I knew.
I am so pleased to no longer be a melodramatic and hormonal adolescent. It is possible, though, that if you listen carefully outside my house as I am not-packing and not-organizing, you'll hear me wailing along to the strains of one of the greats of the nineties, "nine-thousand, ninehundredandthirtysix miles away," you know, what Google tells me is the distance between Houston and Singapore. It's possible that when you ask me how the moving prep is going, my eyes may get a little watery and I'll tell you something a little too truthful for small talk, that I'm scared to pieces. It's possible you'll catch me doing yoga breathing in common places like my grocery store so that my heart doesn't beat so hard and fast all the time.
So you might justifiably ask, as I'm asking myself, why leave, if all you've ever wanted is to stay? Other than the obvious attractions of Singapore and traveling in general, which I hope I'll detail as this blog continues, I have a story to sort-of explain myself.
Picture me at sixteen, again. Before the move, this time. My summer job was as a lifeguard and counselor at a YMCA day camp, and while the job was good, the camaraderie with the other guards and counselors was the point of life. A few older (read: hot) counselors organized a hike-in, hike-out camping trip, and I was thrilled to join the small group for a week in the wilderness. I loaded my borrowed pack with dehydrated eggs, Dr. Brommer's and a suspiciously ramshackle water filter, and we set off in someone's dilapidated Jimmy up to North Carolina's winding roads. We hiked twelve miles in the first day, and though I believed myself to be in good shape I can remember checking to see if my quads were actually turning red from the painful heat they were generating as we hiked the next day's six miles, but the journey was worth the destination. We finally topped a last grueling rise, hearing the roar of water, and I saw a waterfall, breathtaking as every one is. This one had a little tumble-y, rocky fall at the top into a small, still, waist-deep bathing pool, and then a long sheer drop from the pool down into a larger, deeper pool that fed into shoals and the continuation of the river. The backdrop to all of it was a large, rocky, cliff, closing in the lower pool along a side adjacent to the falls.
I'm sure we may have spent a few days camping and cooking and hiking around before deciding to jump off the cliff, but we were all teenagers, and without those fully formed frontal lobes in our cerebral cortexes I think it's possible some of us decided immediately that we must do it.
Red Cross CPR and First-aid trained all, we checked the depth of the splash pool first, I promise. Then the older kids hiked to the bottom of the falls to cross the river at the shoals and scrabble back up to the top across a neighboring ridge rather than attempt to scale the rocks. I watched as the first stood on the highest rock and sprung into the air above the water. He seemed to hang there, and then after he splashed into the pool, he seemed to take years to surface. It struck me that he must be very lucky to have not met a terrible end. I'm generally a cautious person. AND I'm pretty afraid of heights. At first I just decided that there was no way I was doing something that was clearly so foolish. But as I watched my friends and super-hot older dudes leap into the air, again and again, I wavered. I could blame peer pressure, but I think it's more likely that fear of missing out got me across the river and climbing the narrow ridge trail, abetted by a little of that adolescent mental under-development. The first jumper was waiting for us at the top with instructions. "There's a rock about ten feet down that sticks out. Make sure you jump far enough out to clear it." And suddenly I could see myself smashing a clumsy foot on that rock and cartwheeling down to catch a bad angle in the water, and I knew that this was a terrible idea, and I just wanted to climb back down, very carefully, and go back to watching, safely, not smashed on any rocks. Nonetheless, I walked toward the edge, the forest trail transitioned from scrubby grasses and mosses to bare rock, and my knees began to shake so hard that it seemed that it made my teeth chatter, though I suppose my teeth might have chattered on their own. I stood there, shaking, and looked straight out, not down, and saw myself to be level with the tops of tall pines on a steep rise whose roots were level with the tops of other tall trees at the water's edge.
In my memory, the cliff must be forty feet high. I have no idea how accurate that estimate might actually be, but I can remember that falling that far took longer than I thought it would. I can't remember actually jumping, just the stillness of falling for a long time. I didn't scream or shut my eyes or flail or try to do tricks, and I just remember seeing the landscape in front of me both as an indistinguishable wall of green and as individual trees and branches and leaves and needles and shafts of sunlight. It was exquisitely beautiful. And then the water was cold and clear, and deeper than I remembered, and I was shaking still, but now from the cold and the thrill rather than fear.
So I'm moving to Singapore because I believe myself to be the kind of person who jumps off of waterfalls. I don't want to refuse an opportunity because I'm afraid to try. As much as I had wanted for my children to enjoy the deep security of having always lived in the same place and having always gone to the same school with the same friends, I also want them to know that they can jump even with shaking knees and to experience the kind of beauty that they can clearly see in the mind's eye more than twenty years later. I want to learn to let go of what I thought I wanted and keep my hands and heart open to what life has to offer. I think leaving your home and going to a new place is always hard, and I think this will be hard, for me and for them, but I think sometimes hard things are worth the effort. I hope I'm not wrong. If nothing else, it might give them material for a good college essay.
I don't think I intend for this blog to be quite so confessional, going forward, though I can't really predict. I hope if you're interested you'll return for the experience and lots of pictures of packing for an international move (which hopefully I'll get to eventually), and flying 22 hours, and eating fun foods, and finding a new home, and visiting new places, and making new friends at new grocery stores, and of course I'll be a total know-it-all and tell you all the things you probably already know about Singapore and Asia and traveling, but for now I felt I had to begin at the beginning. In twenty-seven days I'll turn thirty-nine (which is a fun sentence to say) twenty-three years older than when I jumped off of a cliff, and in thirty-one days I'll move nearly ten thousand miles from my home. I'm writing so that at least this time I remember jumping.
If you run into me in these next few weeks, you'll probably ask something about how the moving prep is going, and I'll probably express something positive about how steady work goes quickly or something. And now you know the lie of it; I'm even blogging to procrastinate from those very necessary preparations. Bless the Internet. You'll probably also say something about how exciting it is that we get to move to such a fantastic place; and I'll agree with you, and I truly do agree. There is a part of my heart and my brain that is very excited to live on the literal other side of the world for three years and meet new people and eat great food and see amazing places that I never thought I'd see without Anthony Bourdain narrating. That part of me is eager to go and procrastinates by looking at possible houses and condos in Singapore and planning weekend holidays all over Asia.
There is a part of me, as well, that's sad to leave my home, and I keep feeling swept back and forth between those two parts.
Growing up, I lived in six cities in four states over 18 years and attended eight different schools. My parents worked hard to make every transition as smooth as possible and to make each place home, but moving wasn't fun. It was hard to leave a place that had become at least familiar, and it was hard to get my footing in a new place. In my memory, that idiom suits the feeling of being new very well; new is a sea shore with big moss-covered rocks and unpredictable waves. Once I get used to the feeling of the slippery rocks, maybe figure out which ones are wobbly, clear my eyes from salt so I can watch for incoming swells, I know I'll be able to stand, but my feet keep slipping and there are several hard falls before everything gets sorted. Getting my footing in a new place was scary and hard, every time, but I was proud that I could do it. I wrote my college essay about how having moved made me adaptable and resilient, and I'm still proud that though I'm not sure I'm an outgoing person by nature, I know I can put on some pretty shoes, lock up the scared part of myself and go into a sea of new people pretending like I was born to stand on those slippery rocks.
I have known as long as I have had a choice, however, that I wanted to be a person with a place, and even more, I wanted my children to be the kind of secure, happy kids I saw looking back at me as an inviolate flock as I was introduced at the new kid; they had always known each other and knew who puked on the merry-go-round in pre-k, and they'd never have as much in common with this weird new girl. I would tell anyone that I didn't care where I ended up as long as I never, ever had to move again. So as an adult, I've pursued that goal. I've lived in my house for twelve years, which is seven years longer than I'd previously lived in any one house and four years longer than I've lived continuously in any state. My son has gone to the same school for seven years, which is four years longer than I attended any school. There's a guy at my grocery store (yes, MY store; of course I go to the same one regularly) who I've talked to nearly every week for fourteen years; his daughter was three when I first met him and now she's graduating from high school. I enjoy, daily, the kind of familiarity and continuity that I longed for growing up.
And now I'm leaving this dreamed-for home, willingly, and happily, in many ways. But, yeah, as a friend said when I told her, I'm kind of the last person you'd expect to do this.
To get a picture of my current mental state, please picture me in 1994, having undertaken move number six under heavy protest, sixteen years old, maximally nerdy, beflanneled even in the South in August, and completely devastated to have left the town where REM spawned and I myself knew actual people who had actually talked to Michael Stipe while thrifting, to come to a town without so much as a mall. That summer before my Junior year started I was fully in mourning for the life I had left behind, moping around with headphones on and my carefully horizontal Discman all but attached to my hand. Counting Crows was nearly my only playlist, and cringing, I can almost hear myself sing along in my new room, grocery stores, art museums. "Raining in Baltimore" was the emotional apex of the album for me, singing about missing someone and being morose in the rain, and when Adam would sing that his missing lover was "three thousand five hundred miles away" my voice would break every time as I oversang "four hundred sixty-two miles away," the distance I had calculated, in the days before Google Maps, between me and my friends and my places and the things I knew.
I am so pleased to no longer be a melodramatic and hormonal adolescent. It is possible, though, that if you listen carefully outside my house as I am not-packing and not-organizing, you'll hear me wailing along to the strains of one of the greats of the nineties, "nine-thousand, ninehundredandthirtysix miles away," you know, what Google tells me is the distance between Houston and Singapore. It's possible that when you ask me how the moving prep is going, my eyes may get a little watery and I'll tell you something a little too truthful for small talk, that I'm scared to pieces. It's possible you'll catch me doing yoga breathing in common places like my grocery store so that my heart doesn't beat so hard and fast all the time.
So you might justifiably ask, as I'm asking myself, why leave, if all you've ever wanted is to stay? Other than the obvious attractions of Singapore and traveling in general, which I hope I'll detail as this blog continues, I have a story to sort-of explain myself.
Picture me at sixteen, again. Before the move, this time. My summer job was as a lifeguard and counselor at a YMCA day camp, and while the job was good, the camaraderie with the other guards and counselors was the point of life. A few older (read: hot) counselors organized a hike-in, hike-out camping trip, and I was thrilled to join the small group for a week in the wilderness. I loaded my borrowed pack with dehydrated eggs, Dr. Brommer's and a suspiciously ramshackle water filter, and we set off in someone's dilapidated Jimmy up to North Carolina's winding roads. We hiked twelve miles in the first day, and though I believed myself to be in good shape I can remember checking to see if my quads were actually turning red from the painful heat they were generating as we hiked the next day's six miles, but the journey was worth the destination. We finally topped a last grueling rise, hearing the roar of water, and I saw a waterfall, breathtaking as every one is. This one had a little tumble-y, rocky fall at the top into a small, still, waist-deep bathing pool, and then a long sheer drop from the pool down into a larger, deeper pool that fed into shoals and the continuation of the river. The backdrop to all of it was a large, rocky, cliff, closing in the lower pool along a side adjacent to the falls.
I'm sure we may have spent a few days camping and cooking and hiking around before deciding to jump off the cliff, but we were all teenagers, and without those fully formed frontal lobes in our cerebral cortexes I think it's possible some of us decided immediately that we must do it.
Red Cross CPR and First-aid trained all, we checked the depth of the splash pool first, I promise. Then the older kids hiked to the bottom of the falls to cross the river at the shoals and scrabble back up to the top across a neighboring ridge rather than attempt to scale the rocks. I watched as the first stood on the highest rock and sprung into the air above the water. He seemed to hang there, and then after he splashed into the pool, he seemed to take years to surface. It struck me that he must be very lucky to have not met a terrible end. I'm generally a cautious person. AND I'm pretty afraid of heights. At first I just decided that there was no way I was doing something that was clearly so foolish. But as I watched my friends and super-hot older dudes leap into the air, again and again, I wavered. I could blame peer pressure, but I think it's more likely that fear of missing out got me across the river and climbing the narrow ridge trail, abetted by a little of that adolescent mental under-development. The first jumper was waiting for us at the top with instructions. "There's a rock about ten feet down that sticks out. Make sure you jump far enough out to clear it." And suddenly I could see myself smashing a clumsy foot on that rock and cartwheeling down to catch a bad angle in the water, and I knew that this was a terrible idea, and I just wanted to climb back down, very carefully, and go back to watching, safely, not smashed on any rocks. Nonetheless, I walked toward the edge, the forest trail transitioned from scrubby grasses and mosses to bare rock, and my knees began to shake so hard that it seemed that it made my teeth chatter, though I suppose my teeth might have chattered on their own. I stood there, shaking, and looked straight out, not down, and saw myself to be level with the tops of tall pines on a steep rise whose roots were level with the tops of other tall trees at the water's edge.
In my memory, the cliff must be forty feet high. I have no idea how accurate that estimate might actually be, but I can remember that falling that far took longer than I thought it would. I can't remember actually jumping, just the stillness of falling for a long time. I didn't scream or shut my eyes or flail or try to do tricks, and I just remember seeing the landscape in front of me both as an indistinguishable wall of green and as individual trees and branches and leaves and needles and shafts of sunlight. It was exquisitely beautiful. And then the water was cold and clear, and deeper than I remembered, and I was shaking still, but now from the cold and the thrill rather than fear.
So I'm moving to Singapore because I believe myself to be the kind of person who jumps off of waterfalls. I don't want to refuse an opportunity because I'm afraid to try. As much as I had wanted for my children to enjoy the deep security of having always lived in the same place and having always gone to the same school with the same friends, I also want them to know that they can jump even with shaking knees and to experience the kind of beauty that they can clearly see in the mind's eye more than twenty years later. I want to learn to let go of what I thought I wanted and keep my hands and heart open to what life has to offer. I think leaving your home and going to a new place is always hard, and I think this will be hard, for me and for them, but I think sometimes hard things are worth the effort. I hope I'm not wrong. If nothing else, it might give them material for a good college essay.
I don't think I intend for this blog to be quite so confessional, going forward, though I can't really predict. I hope if you're interested you'll return for the experience and lots of pictures of packing for an international move (which hopefully I'll get to eventually), and flying 22 hours, and eating fun foods, and finding a new home, and visiting new places, and making new friends at new grocery stores, and of course I'll be a total know-it-all and tell you all the things you probably already know about Singapore and Asia and traveling, but for now I felt I had to begin at the beginning. In twenty-seven days I'll turn thirty-nine (which is a fun sentence to say) twenty-three years older than when I jumped off of a cliff, and in thirty-one days I'll move nearly ten thousand miles from my home. I'm writing so that at least this time I remember jumping.
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