What It Feels Like to Want to Live Everywhere At Once
Lately I’ve been trying to put into words what it feels like to want to live everywhere I love at once –
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I want to wake up in New York. I want to be young in a city of neon and giants. I want to catch a subway into Brooklyn and I want to get lost somewhere in between the bodegas and dive bars.
I want to wake up in Paris. I want to buy flowers and brie on a hillside under the shadow of a windmill and I want to eat macarons for breakfast with my feet dangling over the Seine.
I want to wake up in Nashville. I want to listen to Johnnie and Willie and Hank on vinyl and I want to dance in a pair of red leather boots with a bourbon in my hand.
I want to wake up in Dublin. I want to stroll down the canals with the swans and the cobblestone lanes with the buskers. I want to down pints of Guinness with the old men in the pub and hear their stories of the good old days in a dirty old town.
I want to wake up in Barcelona. I want to sip sangria while the waves nip my toes and I want to wear long skirts and dance all night long. I want the colors of la Sagrada Familia to paint my face and I want to wander down las ramblas in the heat of a Spanish summer.
I want to wake up in Edinburgh. I want to sip Scotch in the hills of the highlands. I want to wander through the cobbled closes and I want to read Burns under the shadow of a castle on a hill. I want to stroll down the Leith and I want to sit atop Arthur’s mount and see where the expanse of the city meets the expanse of the Forth meets the expanse of the sky.
I want to wake up in Chicago. I want to hear the electric hum of the El passing over the Loop or the effervescent noise of subway jazz musicians and baseball fans. I want to feel the warm summer breeze in my hair as I cruise along the lakeshore drive in the back seat of a cab in the early hours of the morning, buzzing on craft beer and infinite youth.
You know the feeling?
I do. I have never been the kind of person to relate to people who want to put roots down somewhere. The kind of people five-year plans that outline them buying a home in a good school district and putting up a white picket fence. Those kind of people fascinate me, because the notion of making one place your home forever seems romantic and natural and isn’t that the American dream? But I am not like those kind of people. Give a city a year or so and I start to get restless. My feet start itching to go somewhere new.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong or right with either lifestyle. Different keeps the world interesting. But one fits an institutional status quo while the other is divergent. Putting down roots is what you’re supposed to do. Which is why it makes it so hard to explain to people why I can’t do that. I don’t ever see myself taking out a mortgage on a home. How could I possibly choose one place to live forever? Asking me to choose one city from all the ones that I love is like asking a scholar to choose only one book to read for the rest of his life. Impossible.
Perhaps it’s that I’m addicted to new beginnings. I like the freedom of a clean slate. The promise that I could be anyone I want to be in a city where no one knows my name. Or maybe it’s because I’m an interminable student. I seek out new places to learn their quirks and cultures and traditions, and then I seek out another. Maybe I’m just easily distracted.
I live abroad and everyone always asks me – why I am here? But don’t you miss home? Of course I do. I miss all of my homes. The cities that have left their marks on my soul. I left Chicago for the chance to explore the great capitals of Europe. Moving here has been my dream since before I can remember, to the point where I can never seem to find the right words when people ask why I chose to move so far away. This was just always going to be a part of my life. I’d never envisioned it going any other way. But living in Dublin and now Glasgow, I sometimes wake up missing the windy city with a strange sense of guilt. But I’ve realized that if I moved back, I would surely wake with the same longing to return somewhere else, somewhere new. That’s the trouble. When you fall in love with places rather than things, you’ll always be haunted by the nostalgia of what it felt like to know that place like the back of your hand. You leave your heart scattered across geographical pinpoints.
Right now I am sitting on a precipice in my life. A metaphorical fork in the road. I can’t see into the foreseeable future. I don’t know where I am going to be in a few months. If I will stay where I am or find my way back to an old home or if I will be starting over somewhere new again altogether. It’s not the most comfortable of feelings. I feel untethered, like I am a feather on the air. And I do have my doubts. The truth is, restlessness sounds romantic but I can’t help but wonder if it’s only because I haven’t found anywhere I feel I belong. But this isn’t the first time I’ve been at this fork, not able to see what’s down the road. I doubt it will be my last.
And I think how fortunate I am to have friends all over the world. And how incredible it is to witness different cultures flourish in a world that’s a lot smaller than you’d think. And I’m grateful for my restlessness, because I am learning archaeology and art and architecture and anthropology and sociology and psychology from the places I call home.
Maybe I can’t put it into words. Maybe those people – the ones who want to settle down, who don’t care to chase the alluring mystery of ‘what’s out there?’ – will never understand. That’s fine. Because as long as they are fulfilled in their life, I am fulfilled in mine. I am not running away, nor am I missing out. I am just hopelessly indecisive, splitting my time between the places that I love. Because home is a concept, not a singular place. And I make a home in every place I go.
Steve Engledow
So very well written. If the opportunity arises to travel and your healthy then you have to go. My generation was told find a place and settle down. Waking up in all those romantic, historical and interesting places would be fantastic. However now I’m just happy to wake up.
Elena Jasic
Loved this so much & can relate a lot. Thank you for this.
amaris becerra
i’m, 16 and this was the perfect way to describe what i’ve been missing, but nobody seems to understand why i’m so eager to finish high school and finally start my life, traveling, and they make me feel so guilty because i want to leave and never look back, they make me feel like it’s not a way of living.
Lexi
amaris becerraim 16 too, and same. i just can’t imagine being in the same place forever. i literally cry thinking about the places i’ll never be able to visit haha
krista smith
amaris becerrai feel the same way! i graduate this year and i feel so lost because i want to be 100 places at once and it makes me want to break down and cry. theres too many places and people in the world for me to see in my one lifetime and im scared i wont experience it all
Tushita Mehta
amaris becerraI’m 15 and I relate to this so much !! I can’t imagine living in the same place forever. There are sooo many places I would love to visit. I would dress in a similar way to the locals so that I don’t feel like an outsider in those places. I want to experience everything to the fullest. Also, just like Lexi said in the replies, I sometimes cry too thinking about the places I would never be able to visit.
Alex
See, I came here to read this as someone who has just moved for the first time at 23, and is quite hopelessly on the opposite side of that picket fence. I feel like the place I just left two months ago is the place I eventually want to return to. That it is the place I love, that makes me happy, and heals my soul. This isn’t to say I don’t want to travel, I do. Very much so, I would love to go and see more of the world. In fact, I plan to. The problem is, I’m not sure I would want to permanently, or semi permanently (more than a month?) stay anywhere other than this place I love that I’ve mentioned.
And so, I wanted to read the opinion of someone who is the opposite. Having done so, I do feel enlightened and enriched. I’m still unsure of my feelings… if perhaps they’re just an overreaction to being away for more than a month for the first time in my life, and the pendulum will, in time, swing back to a balanced mindset on this kind of thing… or if it’s a true attachment I’ll never want to give up. Either way, my restlessness on the topic has at least come to ease reading this. Currently, I’m content with knowing I don’t know yet, I guess. Thanks for the read.
Rose
I loved reading this and I can completely relate. I have nothing to add only to second every point you made, it really feels like you put my feelings into words!