work.

All my life I have moved away from places and never returned. Houses and schools and streets become faded, blurry, then mythic and dreamlike. I don’t know that I even want to go back to disturb their perfection. Once I got the idea to pull up the street view on Google Maps for a street I lived in on when I was 11 years old. There was a corner with a shady hotel and a man who sat out front and sang, and there was a sour-smelling Chinese restaurant that we never ate at. I pulled up the street view and everything looked so small and artificial - not at all how I remembered.

But Wellfleet is something different. I lived here for three years, and I left, but somehow this place has got inside of me. The mythic and the dreamlike mix with the reality. I leave and come back, and leave and come back. I’m not blind to its imperfections, and I know why I left. But I can’t stop coming back. Right now it feels like I’m here, and I’m not here, and I’m on vacation, and I’ve never left. I can’t even attach a word to the feeling, some complicated mixture of homesickness and loneliness and familiarity and relief. I have the space I need here, space inside my own head.

I have been writing, though not as much as I mean to, and not here. Last month was emotional and heavy. I spent my time being anxious about work and moving, or trying not to be anxious about work and moving. As always, my worries accomplished nothing, and I’m on the other side, and everything seems so clear and simple now. And now I’m in Wellfleet, and I have work to do.