Up To Date: Homecoming

I'm writing this from an airport hotel just outside Brussels, on a layover between Bristol (sweet Stuart and lovely Kate!) and Chicago (an ocean of friends and family that I've missed ferociously!) After a hilariously bumpy yesterday (delayed flight, wildcat baggage workers' strike that has one of my bags waylaid with thousands of others in a Brussels Airport purgatory, a situation about which I'm weirdly feeling zen) I've got just one last push between me and home.

I've got some stray posts yet to come - a bit on London, an overdue "useful tips for Berlin" post that nobody needs, and maybe a couple odd thinklets here and there - but I wanted to mark the last leg of this journey in real time. After the jump: yeah!

A ship of birds, wrought of iron, on a li'l rocky outcrop-beach in Split, Croatia. Flying and seas and whatnot! IT'S LIKE AN EVOCATIVE IMAGE EXCEPT IT'S NOT THAT EVOCATIVE I'LL DO BETTER NEXT TIME

It's been a very different summer than last in a lot of ways. Beyond the big ones, obviously - I'm not grappling with the unmooring change of divorce, I'm not frantically trying to salvage my academic career, I wasn't seeing most of these places for the first time. And probably most of the ways that it's been different have grown out of those big changes - ripples from ripples from ripples - but it's been interesting nonetheless.

In the past month, I hilariously found myself picking up English-made pyjamas and slippers new (albeit steeply discounted) on the road, eventually figuring out and articulating: this is all a sublimation of what I really want, which is to be home. See also: some time in Berlin spent making to-do lists for my return to Chicago, or home-furnishing-and-design research as I start thinking about filling out my living space as I get back to the city I love best. Much as I've loved being over here, and much as I've put most of my focus towards either working or taking in my surroundings, that pull of home is strong.

Cinque Terre kicking-around actually feels like it must have been a year or two ago, this summer both flew by and feels like it has been an age and a half.

Why this summer and not last? A few obvious reasons I guess: while I grew to love Jamaica Plain (so much, and with so much love and gratitude for my Boston friends) this past year, I obviously had mixed feelings at best about returning to Boston. Last summer was more (necessary, friend-assisted) heart-and-life-rebuilding indulgence, this summer more work-focused and solitary. And, you know, after a school year that was full of weddings, conferences, trips to visit friends in New York and Chicago and points beyond, I haven't fed the homebody part of myself in almost two years. (Berlin, at four weeks, was my longest stay anywhere without travel since... at least April 2015.) I am ready for a good long stay, to feel my roots, to dig in and reclaim my sense of home.

And to some extent it's just that narrative sixth-sense. It's time for a chapter shift, after the (mercifully) graceful epilogue of my last year in Boston. And while I don't know what this next chapter will look like in every aspect, I'm ready to be in the moment and not looking forward in anticipation.

Reading a borrowed copy of High Fidelity on the South Bank, feeling both very much "world is my oyster" and "I am a walking cliche," which is basically the razor's edge on which I live my extremely cool and normal life!!!

So, once I hit "publish" and close my laptop, I start moving with a glorious velocity back to Chicago, to my tribe, to a robust and energizing creative scene of generous collaborators and loving thinkers. I move towards the family and friends who (with many others scattered across the globe) held me up during the scariest time of this sea change. And, with more than a twinge of sadness, I move away from my European friends, the merry and thoughtful and heroic few whose hearts have so comprehensively captured mine. I'll always have a few brain cells parked across the globe, but for now... it's time to go home.