Home

       "Home."
        I won't lie, I'm not totally sure I know what that means anymore.  The place that you live?  The place that you grew up?  The storage boxes of all the things that you'll have when you can "someday" afford a house?  The mountains that snagged half of your heart?  The friends that make life not only worth living but worth loving?  The desk you stare at, day in and out?  The coffee shop that is your favorite?
        Maybe home is a good beer, or the steady click of oars on a long empty lake in the morning as the sun comes up?  It could be the crunch of gravel under your feet, or the familiar feel of your bike pedals straining as you push up a hill.  Home.  Is it that place that forever changed you?  Taught you who you were?   Or is it a room, with a bed and stack of books you're meant to read before the end of term?
        I honestly don't know.  My adult life has been an amalgam of places, people and new things.  Between the ages of 18 and 25, I didn't sleep in the same bed, in the same room for more than a 10 month period at a time.  I bounced around from Oregon to California, up and down the Mississippi river, to Guatemala and Mexico and back.  I collected dishes I liked, and a table runner made by a friend I loved.  The things that I owned got sorted and purged and put in boxes.  Then I got a job, an apartment, a community that I loved.  I spent three years deciding that I might just have found "home."
        A job that I loved.  A hobby that gave me a second family in improv.  A bedroom covered in color and a bicycle to obsessively ride around a city that I identified with, a place that screamed in so many ways "me!"
        And then an opportunity to go to graduate school popped up.  And I did what I almost always do.  I said yes.  Even though it meant moving a half a world away.  Leaving my job and my friends, redefining "home" as yet again a place that was far-away from where I would be living.  I took all of my things and put them back in boxes, I gave up my apartment and cleaned out my closet.  I put my life into two bags and a carry-on, and checked them at the American Airlines counter on October 2nd 2013, then said goodbye.
        I started over.  Again.  For the umpteenth time.  Further defining my twenties as a decade of movement and change.  I decided that a year, maybe more, of my life would see me cycling across cobblestones and receiving emails about the ongoing repair of my departments several hundred year old building.  My life would become defined by article after article on gender theory and performativity, and I'd go back to rowing---on a narrow river, not a pristine lake, but hey--rowing is rowing.  
       I found friends.  People that I can honestly say I hope to stay in touch with forever.  I discovered a favorite coffee place, and learned to like wine.  It took me some time, but I started to settle.  I started to see that I *could* happily do a PhD in Cambridge, that I liked doing stand-up and eating a sandwich on King's Parade.  That this place too, could be "Home."
        But as I stumbled off of AA1215 at 7pm on March 17th and cried when I saw Portland's famous carpet, I realized that the hard thing about "home" is that I have more than one.  My home is an old timber town hit on hard times that never seem to end.  My home is a lake in Washington County where your oars reflect across mirrored water.  My home is a pink bicycle and Portland beer.  My home is a neighborhood in SE where I will someday buy a house.  My home is in the folded endless mountains of the Alta Verapaz, and in the redrock deserts of the SE United States.  My home is an ancient University town in Europe, and my home is defined by the people I am lucky enough to be surrounded by, and they live in all the places I've ever spent large chunks of time.
       Home isn't, and can't ever be, just one place for me.  Part of that seems unbearable, like I'm pulling out chunks of my heart and leaving them snagged on the peaks and valleys and cobblestones of a half a dozen cities across the world.  But part of it is wonderful--because it means that "home" can be anywhere I'm willing to let it be.
       That said, I'm damn happy to be back in PDX.  Because this place is HOME in a million and one ways, and I have friends here that truly feel like my family.