I know it’s not very zen of me, but I have been living in next January. Next January, I’ll move back to my beloved Marin hills. I’ll get a set of Eggshell pasta bowls from East Fork, they’re speckled, and they’ll compliment the dark wood paneling of the studio I’ll find, they’ll compliment the redwoods that stack the hillsides. I’ll get a job at a restaurant, maybe, or Equator, like I always said I would. I’ll move back because I have been dancing around the question of can I build a life anywhere, and I see all the ways that I can, but I struggle to find the reason that I should.

On a Friday night in June, I walk through the streets of Ladenburg, I see myself at the corner taverns, I see myself furnishing the apartment framed with window boxes, I see myself spending evenings in the grassy park that slopes along the Rhine. On Sunday, I listen to the women at the cafe table next to mine, to stories of their first years in Germany, they too, are transplants from abroad. I’m here for just months, it will be brief in the scope of time but I am trying on this persona of a transplant, the expat who moved abroad and fell in love with another country and fell in love and this is how a place might become home. I ride past the farms on a country road, lined with red poppies and I smell goats and I see myself here, too, but the goats remind me of Carpinteria and the farmhouse and the barn next to the bridge at the corner of Nidever and the 192. 

—

I turn thirty and I think of the choices that have found me here, on the Eastern Promenade in Maine, where Dad grew up for some early years or maybe just months of his life. We didn’t remember this before but he reminds us now and in a city that spans bridges and miles and an East to West, we are 1200 ft from his childhood home. I turn thirty and on the last day of being twenty-nine my confidence about this new decade disintegrates because I remember the life I wanted at age twenty, I sketched it out in my notebook at the time and I realize that twenty-year old me knew myself as well as thirty-year old me. But twenty-year old me hadn’t chosen a path, had only sketched a destination. Thirty-year old me has chosen a path without considering the destination, and now that I see it I think I will retrace my steps because I haven’t walked so far down, and even if I had, I have been trained as a chemist in the decade since so I know that quantum tunneling exists and while I am not quanta I contain them, and surely I can tunnel too.

I spend the days around thirty immersing myself in the Atlantic, the whiteboard outside the beach bathroom tells me something about tides and temperatures and I read it as a prescription that might shock the conflict from my system. I savor the physical discomfort of the cold, the first dip in which I can last only seconds, the next dip and I begin to numb and the third I swim strokes, I count to twenty, I dunk my head under and revel in the temporary bliss. Some days later, I arrive to a city that will be my home for the summer. I chose for it to be, when it was in writing; daylight is long in the summers here. There are things I didn’t read on paper. That I have come here alone, that it is Corpus Christi the day I arrive and the only German word I can say is thank you, so I Danke my way through a Turkish cafe where I eat cake for lunch and a Doner shop where I requisition a falafel for dinner and ask my sister whether face wash or dish soap would be a better substitute for body wash, until a store is open tomorrow. I wait for the discomfort of foreignness to give way to some version of satisfied bliss, but it doesn’t come. For a week, I test it, I buy honey bar soap and a French Press and borrow a bike and find a cafe that I can linger at, impressing home onto my surroundings, because I believe I have become good at doing this. But no part of home is sticking. I suppose I have set false expectations, and presumed an arbitrary need that this place might feel like home at all. I wonder if I’m wasting the long daylight.

—

I turn thirty and I see the life I want and I wonder why I am waiting to choose it. In these past twelve months, I have thought often of the last night I spent in Marin, on the square in San Anselmo there are families with picnics, I see myself here in five Junes, maybe ten. I believe that I cannot have it yet, that I must wait, I must earn it, I must come back to it, that there will be some greater satisfaction for having returned. A strange form of gatekeeping I have found myself applying to my own life. The pieces of this life have been in my grasp in years past, I say my grasp because I now see that they take some effort to hold onto, or, maybe, that I have grasped them out of simultaneous uncertainty and fear that they were worth carrying with me. I look at the pieces that I have held, the junctions at which I have set certain ones aside, testing myself. I look at the cycles of years, because it is never more than a year, in which I come back to the same pieces. If I retrace my steps, can I pick them back up, can I turn them over again?