How To Love Where You Are
Also known as Travel Dispatch #4: Spain / Ireland.
When I first started writing this travelogue, I formatted it as a list of things I learned in Madrid and Menorca titled “I Love My Friends.” The concept, though obviously gold, inconveniently left no room for me to include the latter portion of my recent half-month of travel — a family tour around Ireland — and, I think, something a bit more from the heart is better anyway when it comes to writing about love.
Love of places might well be my most-experienced and least-written about kind of love. But maybe that’s not even true; maybe I’m always writing about it, even if I’m not; maybe the reason place is taught, in fiction, as both setting and character is because of the way it moves us like people do. Place causes, grounds, and holds every part of an experience.
I know I am moved by places to the point that I continually find it impossible to know where I am supposed to be. Ironically, I live and have been living for four years in my hometown, the place that used to mean, to me, anywhere but here. My ever-evolving relationship with this place feels at this point central to who I am as a person. But so is the regular experience of finding “home” in everywhere I go, something that makes travel equally addicting and heartbreaking to me.
How to describe places like Menorca? Places where the land is untarnished enough that to get to a beach, you have to first drive several km down a dirt road and then hike for thirty minutes? Where the sand on the north is red and the sand on the south is white, and everything in between is green, brown, chalk, and everything beyond is blue. In Menorca you can eat lobster stew and prawn croquettes and buy bottles of pomada from the convenience store to go with your cans of anchovy-stuffed olives and bags of marcona almonds. You can change in and out of your swimsuit right on the beach and shower outdoors and leave your laundry outside all night. You’ll see cats wander at night who probably don’t want to meet you. But the slim silver fish in the water will swim right up to you and around you, unfazed. It’ll surprise you how much you want to eat them.
Maybe I’d rather live in Madrid — a small island like Menorca might grow isolating. You can still eat slim silver fish in Madrid, wrapped around olives and cheese on a toothpick, alongside your glass of vermouth, red or white depending on your mood. And always potato chips, and little glasses of tap beer that are always good (cold, bitter) and you never have to decide what kind. It’s kind of nice, eating at 8 PM, getting a break in the middle of the day, getting fed casually at every bar you go to instead of going through the whole thing at a restaurant. It’s nice to walk, the whole city, walking walking walking down cobblestone hills and in the middle of tiny winding streets until you say My dogs are barking! My pigs are squealing! which unsettles Katharine a bit. She doesn’t like the phrase. Katharine’s friend Juan says that the thing that’s so great about Madrid is it’s just a town, compared to other European cities, it just started as a little medieval town, before the capital was moved there, so it started expanding out and out and out rather than always feeling large at the center, like Paris or London. But you love Paris and London, too. How is it that some people live in Paris and London and most people don’t?
Where we live is something we talk about in Menorca: Regan, in New York, where dinner for two costs more than dinner for us four that evening; Elana, in Detroit, where everyone drives like a maniac and she can’t commune with nature; Katharine, in Hawaii, where she is always connected with nature but not with people, where people act in transactional ways and her friends always seem to leave. Regan says everyone leaves New York, too. And me? Me at home, for years, in a constant state of wanting to leave until one day I didn’t. Want to, that is. It was mysterious how that change occurred, but it’s no mystery to me now: I just decided it was the right place for me. And since then, I’ve felt happy where I am.
Until this, of course, which I probably knew would happen. When I travel I’m reminded of how free I am, and in the bedroom I’ve slept in my entire life I wake in the middle of the night again and again unable to remember who I am, the bedroom somehow making it more confusing instead of less. Like, if I am me, why am I here? Didn’t we leave here long ago?
In Dublin there are blue skies, perfect fall days. I need a coat now. I didn’t think I would get used to the Irish accent after ten days of the melodic Spanish, but it doesn’t take long, because the people in Ireland speak so kindly, almost like they’re waiting to be asked a question, asked for help. Things I learn I love in Ireland: walking tours, sausage rolls, hot port in a to-go cup. I already knew I loved Guinness but it’s true that it tastes better here: it’s the water from Wicklow, the ever-changing kegs. If I lived here I would figure out the bus. I would get used to the rain because also, I would be having tea all the time. Here’s something: we go to an event for James’s debut novel, and something he talks about as a theme of the book is homesickness. I tear through the book on windy nights on the Dingle peninsula and come across this, put so well by Róisín: “The cure for homesickness is, she knows, to go home. In a way, it’s not the place but the time she misses. She could move back in with her parents, get her job back at the old cafe if it’s still around, and, even then, her life would barely resemble what it was.” Yes, this is why I can’t go back to the places I lived before, even though I miss them. Because really it’s about missing those lives.
The cure for homesickness is to go home, but going home doesn’t always mean going back. This is why where I live now feels, somehow, nothing at all like where I lived in high school, where I lived as a child.
So. How to love where you are?
All I know to do is to look around me and follow suit. I abandon any expectation that I can have things the way I have them at home and instead try on life as everyone else is living it. And that is how I find home everywhere I go. Because if I lived in Galway I would walk to the diving tower with everyone else in the mornings to swim in the freezing ocean, and I would sing songs at the pub if the band was asking for volunteers. Why can’t I do that at home? Or does this mean this is home, that this is where I should be instead?
How to love where you are, when you love the sweeping fells of County Kerry as much as the Martian landscape of Cala Pregonda? So much of the earth, so many places, are still so vivid, so real they seem fake. For thirty minutes we were driving up the western coast of the Ring of Kerry and a rainbow was stretching over the road, from the mountains on the right to the ocean on the left, huge and perfectly articulated and I understood why someone started creating stories about there being something to get to, about rainbows being a portal to somewhere else.
How to love where you are when where you are is not here? When where you are is not home? When home is something you can’t stop finding, or can’t find at all?
When things feel right, we are happy, which I guess is why people ask “what’s wrong” when we’re upset. So really, it was that simple, when I decided I was in the right place, for me to then feel happy. But now I’ve been elsewhere again, and it reminds me that eventually I will have to find a new place to be, because there are so many lives I want to live. Which is why I suppose in my own case there’s always going to be an unspoken second half: the right place for me is the right place for me right now. Because even when I’m happy with where I am, sometimes I will be on a walk in the evening and I’ll look up at the sky and something will happen, where I’ll feel like I’m somewhere else. It’s like there’s a certain color in the cloud or a certain feel to the air or scent of earth and it’s like a portal to elsewhere, and when you look back down, you’re still where you were, even though seconds ago you could have sworn, somewhere, somewhere else. That is also what homesickness is.
Still: the right place right now. Maybe that’s all it takes for you, too? Because I think some people live in London and Paris because that’s where they happen to be. And maybe you happen to be in the right place. And if you’re not, you probably will be soon.
This has been—
xxx your twin flame
I felt so much love from this/I feel so much love for this! The part about homesickness... wow, yes. It's about the life you lived, not even really the place, but it's still about the place, too... because it was where that life happened... I'm happy that you're living so fully.
Yes! This is everything.