A Life Spent Elsewhere
Freedoms price is homelessness, explorations reward is estrangement
I left my family twenty years ago. I see them less than once a year. They are the closest thing I have, yet they know little of who I’ve become.
Let’s untangle the emotional complexities of the modern explorer without a cause, those who leave their country of birth in search of adventure, building lives that could never have been predicted.
By those, I mean me.
I left home at nineteen, young by today’s standards, though my mother was married by that age, so I was already running late. I moved straight to a new city. My whole resolve was to escape parental gravity and carve out a life of my own, chasing the romance of dreams I hadn’t yet dreamt. It wasn’t ambition so much as the pull of new paths.
At first it was thrilling. But each time I returned to my hometown it felt as though I’d never left. By twenty-four I was on a plane to the opposite end of the earth. For four years I was too busy exploring to return, telling myself each season that next year I might move back. Recalling it is a blurry montage of beaches, mountains, cities and airports, full of wonder without the wherewithal. When I finally did visit, I had gained experience but lost my sense of place. The family home, though sturdy, now felt foreign, familiar only in outline. I no longer needed it, only to check in out of duty.
Life became an expedition, each one beginning before the last had fully ended; I was arriving ill-equipped and leaving without clear plans.
As the years passed, punctuated by brief returns, I became acutely aware that I was homeless. I was out of touch with the community I’d grown up in and a foreigner in the places I now lived. Even potential employers would ask when I was heading home, weighing whether I was worth the short-term hire.
Everyone I met asked the same questions: Where are you from? Why would you leave? Why are you here?
My answers were both vague and direct. It was mostly happenstance and adventure.
There’s a particular isolation that comes when decades pass and you’re out of step with where you began, yet never rooted where you are. People hesitate to invest in you, assuming you’ll drift on like so many before.
Ours is a generation that traded permanence for possibility, measuring success not in roots but in movement, only to find ourselves tangled between the two.
Most years I made it worse with offhand remarks about moving home one day. I still do, though I never do.
I watch my parents age through our regular video calls, as if by elongated timelapse, their lives now bound by stories of illness and funerals. I’ve been an absent uncle too, watching my nieces grow into teenagers from afar. A week or two together each year can only stretch so far across the distance of time.
When I broke down in front of my sister, shortly before an actual breakdown, I was stunned to hear she thought I had life sussed. In my mind I’d failed the human experiment: no marriage, no children, no plan. Just hazy memories and depression. To her, I’d carved a life against expectation, a so-called successful creative exploring on my own terms.
I’d always seen life as a series of small, self-contained chapters, each lived intensely. But now the chapters fill decades, become volumes, and I feel an urgency to change tack, or at least to chart a heading.
We’re all chasing the same mirage: to achieve, acquire, and construct an identity, while our egos spar with the body’s slow decline. We can’t take any of it with us. So I’ve set out to download my consciousness into the ether, leaving some trace for others to uncover, despite its lack of coherence or clarity.
Perhaps that’s the greatest fantasy of all, the teenager’s dream of being remembered, only for a gust to whip their voice away into oblivion.
Much Ado About Nothing as my mother would say.
