Goodbyes

I’m going to put this out there right now: I am a big, mushy sap. I cry easily both tears of happiness and tears of sadness, although this has become less frequent with age. I’m the kind of person who watches “The Lion King” and cries when Mufasa dies. That sappy.

And yet, goodbyes have become so easy for me that I am afraid I have lost a bit of human connection with the severity of the goodbye. I never cry when I say goodbye anymore. I don’t really cry when I say hello after an extended period of time, either, unless the person saying hello back is crying (usually my mother). I have become very good at leaving, and somewhere within my traveler self, that scares me a lot.

Let me give you a little background: I am extraordinarily close to my family. I grew up in a huge extended Irish Catholic family. My father’s entire side of the family (his brothers and sister, and their spouses and children) all live within an hour of where I live, with two of the families (one of my uncle’s and his wife and daughters, and my grandparents) living in the same town as me. Christmases and Easters were always family time. “The cousins,” as we like to call ourselves, now range in age from 26 years old all the way down to one year old. We even now have a cousin-in-law and a second cousin. That close. I’m the fourth oldest, and when my older cousins all left for college (all within NJ), they barely came home for the holidays to see the family. I always promised my littler cousins that I would never be that person. But I have been much, much worse than that, disappearing for months at a time to a far off place in search of a dream I have had since I was little.

Off topic, but relevant: When I say this is a dream I’ve had for as long as I can remember, it is more true than even I knew. I was going through papers this week and found a worksheet from 7th or 8th grade on “Creating a New Identity” (in case we needed to go into Witness Protection for some odd reason), and under where I would move were two things I wrote: Montana and California. And I made it to California. Even in high school, my friends called me a hippie and a California girl. It is like I was destined to move out there.

But, back to the topic: Goodbyes. Family. How it has become too easy. I saw most of my family at my graduation party a few days ago, and all of my cousins were asking when I was finally going to be home for good. No matter how long I am gone, they love me and they want to hang out with me.

I guess, for me, goodbyes have become something that just comes with living, especially as someone who is chasing dreams in far-off lands. It is so nice to come home to people who watched me grow up, who know who I was and how much I have grown, to people who don’t hesitate to offer me a ride from the middle of town to my house when it is raining. As much as I have complained about growing up in a boring suburban town that has everyone acting the same and was “so stifling” when I was a teenager, I am so grateful that I have had that experience. It makes coming home so much easier than if I absolutely hated it.

However, I don’t know if I can accurately call NJ my home anymore. I fit in there because I carved a few niches for myself there, because my family is there, because my best friends from high school are there, but I don’t feel truly alive there. I can handle small doses, but I don’t know how I am going to survive in the fall when I have to be there for a full four months. I’m so used to being on my own and doing what I want and reporting it to nobody, that having to live with my parents again, in a town that hasn’t really seen me blossom as my new self, so different from who I was when I left, scares me to no extent.

My mom asked if, when I return from the Peace Corps, I’m going to return to NJ or go back to Los Angeles. In all honesty, I’m hoping to go back to LA, but I don’t know if that is possible. I know LA. I have become an adult in LA. I know all of the highways, my way around downtown, which bus to take to get where, the fastest way to Disneyland. My sorority sisters are there. Some of my best memories have been made at USC. Being a graduate is weird. Knowing that I may be leaving forever in August is even weirder.

I think I’m going to cry when I say goodbye to LA because it may not be temporary. And that is the key to my goodbyes these days. They just feel temporary. My place, my home, at any given time, is temporary to me. Leaving NJ this time was so easy, and coming back is going to be one of the hardest things I will ever do, I think.

Have a great week!