I went back to San Francisco over CMU’s fall break. This is the first year CMU has a fall break, and I, for one, am grateful. I was getting fried and the students were as well. The reason the university gives is because it lets faculty not have to adjust their courses between Spring (when there has since the beginning of time been a Spring Break) and Fall semesters.
When I left San Francisco to come to Pittsburgh, I was…let’s say, not in the best place. This was the first time I’d been back and I needed to figure out if was still my home—spiritual or otherwise.
I knew things were awry soon after getting there. What immediately returned to me, as I wandered around the streets on my own, waiting until my first reunion with friends (as it turned out, my actual high school reunion), was the feeling I had when I was living alone during Covid, right after my divorce. A bone-chilling loneliness and misery. I knew in my mind that wasn’t my situation any longer, but my heart was slow to remember.
Although I have many great friends in San Francisco, it didn’t feel like my home any longer. I have no residence there, no property, not even a piece of furniture getting dusty in a friend’s garage. There was no loved one eagerly awaiting my arrival, nor anyone who was distraught at my leaving. I was just a friend passing through. A tourist in my own city. I missed my friends and I’m sure they missed me, but that’s not what constitutes a home. At least not for me. YMMV.
I came back to Pittsburgh with more of a sense of closure of the long, San Francisco chapter of my life. I expect I’ll go back there often, but I don’t expect I’ll immediately move back there should my contract with Carnegie Mellon expire. It’s not like I wasn’t committed before (because I did absolutely uproot my entire life to make a go of this), but that I realized I don’t have to go back to have a good life. I can make one here. It’s more challenging because I don’t have my friend network, but that just requires some effort here on my part to create one.
I didn’t ask for the life I’m leading now, but as lives go, it’s a pretty good one and I’m fortunate to have it. I have to make the most out of it, without looking backwards. Or in my case, westwards. As Cheryl Strayed writes in Tiny Beautiful Things, “You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding.” So deal me in.
This is a beautiful post Dan. Resonant for me of so many of the feelings of being-this-age and looking back on the many phases of what came before.
Thanks for sharing.