homesick

When I last visited Minnesota, I snapped photos and videos of meaningless landscapes.

Random fields where the corn hadn’t come up yet. Deciduous trees. Lakes whose names I didn’t know.

I fired them off to Tara when I had signal.

Tara is my newest best friend and an Arizona native. She asks me to send content of my home state whenever I go back; like many people I meet here, she has never been to Minnesota and has no reason to ever go. She has absolutely zero concept of what Minnesota looks like. Until she met me, the state that once contained the entirety of my world was completely irrelevant to her. This is jarring but comforting to me for some reason. I love when people don’t know shit about Minnesota. It makes my struggles there feel less relevant.

Tara cannot imagine the kind of cold I was raised in. When my first winter in Arizona approached, I was relieved and also skeptical. After all, how could a place where it never snows possibly feel festive? I was prepared for the most underwhelming holiday season of my life. This was a failure of imagination on my part. It turns out that when people don’t have to brave subfreezing temperatures to hang Christmas lights, they go all out. I was met with a display unlike any I’d ever seen. My first winter here was spent marveling at Christmas lights winding around palm trees and trying to wrap my mind around the fact that some people grow up warm.

this, all over the place

I was raised in a frigid household in a town of one thousand people in a place where the winter air hurts your face. It’s taken me a long time to warm up.

In some ways, the trajectory of my life thus far is a tale as old as time. A favorite cliche, even: a small town girl in a lonely world takes the first ticket out. A teenage version of myself stood at a kitchen counter, one hand covering her mouth and the other gripping her torn open ACT results. My parents waited wide eyed on the other side of the counter for the verdict, their investment in the results out of place given they weren’t going to pay for my college anyway. But for me, it was my personal golden ticket. It meant I’d be able to afford to gtfo of small town Minnesota.

I left Eden Valley for the Twin Cities. Not exactly NYC, I know. But it was the largest metropolitan area where I could get in-state tuition. The population of St. Paul is 300 times that of my hometown.

many such cases of girls leaving for the city

Four years later, I left undergrad with latin honors, a near-perfect resume for medical school, and clinical anxiety/depression. My college years had taken my energy, my first love, my parents’ marriage, my faith in my career path, and most of the lingering affection I had for Minnesota.

I’ve now been out for years, we already know this. And thank god; I can’t imagine how long it would’ve taken for me to get to this point if I had stayed.

When I left at 22, I was hardly anything yet besides what I had been told to be. Nothing but central Minnesota and academic validation and mommy issues and sixty thousand dollars of student debt.

Those first 22 years of my life are freezer burned. The memories leave a weird taste in my mouth. I look back on them as if through frosted glass; I can make them out, but a lot of the details are lost on me.

I left Minnesota, and I didn’t look back. I was finally rid of the place. I felt free.

People say you can’t run away from your problems, but you can! You really can. I’ve written about it before. I ran, and it was gorgeous. Sometimes it’s good and right to get some distance and heal enough to stare your wounds down directly.

I’ve had thousands of miles of distance. I’ve had a few beautiful, expansive years. I’ve never had a single regret about leaving, and I doubt I’ll ever move back.

This is the place I’ve arrived at now: you can take the girl out of Minnesota, but you can’t take the Minnesota out of the girl.

I’ve tried. I lost the stronger parts of my accent, ditched the passive aggression. But Minnesota haunted me still, because I hated going back. I hated how it made me feel.

I hated going back to the sites of my worst memories. I loathed the cold. I hated central minnesota, hated St. Paul. Even Duluth–the large town/tiny city where I spent my last summer in Minnesota sharing a bed with my best friend– I had a disdain for northern Minnesota, too, even though she never did me wrong. But, that’s probably because I left before she ever had the chance.

See, like much of Minnesota, Duluth is idyllic by summer. Lighthouses and boardwalks, honeycomb ice cream and bonfires at Park Point. I can see the charm. In the summertime, the breeze off Lake Superior dispels mosquitoes and does nothing to reveal the brutality of its winter wailing.

During summer in mn, nothing about the crystalline waters and shockingly green trees hints at the spiritually corrosive winter to come. But I grew up there, so I can’t be fooled. Winter will come again. Just as it does, relentlessly, every year. No matter how much you wish summer could stay.

For the past few years, I approached Minnesota like a dog that was used to being kicked. I had been hurt there before, and I expected to be hurt again. I anticipated the pain and was preemptively sore.

Again, I don’t regret leaving. I can’t stress this enough. You can’t heal in the same place that hurt you.

I was free because I was no longer there. But, I also felt like I could never go back without experiencing overwhelming emotional turmoil, and that was a prison in itself.

It felt like Minnesota, and the trauma I experienced there, still had this power over me that I abhorred. It still does; it’s not like I’ve completely cured myself in that regard. But I read something by someone wiser than me (I think it was on substack but haven’t been able to find the passage again to credit the author) recently that stuck with me. It went something like this:

“If you spend your whole life running from something, does it ever really leave you? Or is it still as with you as it was when you started running?”

I’ve thought about it for months.

I was still thinking about it when I returned to Minnesota a couple weeks ago.

My friend Kalie was hosting a retreat in the woods of her youth. I sat on a blanket next to my sister surrounded by more chlorophyll than I’d seen in months. Glowing dandelion fluff floated past me on breezes of sun baked grass. I breathed deeply. I journaled pages and pages– you know how a smell can unlock something vital.

At some point, I had a personal epiphany.

How do I explain this to you? I guess I’ve spent a very long time being very angry. I thought the anger and the pain was because of the things that happened to me in Minnesota, because of the injustice of what I endured there and the place trauma of it all. And there’s an aspect of that, certainly. But anger often belies sadness, or some other younger feeling. And I realized, much to my surprise, that a lot of the pain I was experiencing was actually nostalgia.

Beneath the anger about what happened to me is the sadness about what those things took from me.

Grief implies a void. It implies that there was something there to begin with. Something that was so good it hurt to lose. Something to be nostalgic about.

I don’t look back affectionately on many aspects of my youth. So, beginning to toy with the idea of naming some of my pain as not anger but nostalgia… my brain rejected it at first.

So many lovely, innocent aspects of my upbringing exist in the context of very painful, unfair events. They go hand in hand. It’s difficult to extricate them from each other, and it’s also difficult to hold them both at the same time now. Often, the painful memories completely overshadow the corresponding pure ones in my mind.

Because yes, there’s the fight or flight response I felt as a child when I heard the garage door opening or heard footsteps in the hall outside my shared bedroom. There’s conversations that cut so deep that every syllable is still ingrained in my psyche. There’s a lot of ugly sobbing. But there were also the rare summer suppers on the deck. The pale pink peonies by the garden hose (still my favorite flower). The lilac bushes exploding in the warmth, permeating the deep springs of my childhood. The Dixie Chicks in my mom’s van. Mumford & Sons in my dad’s truck. The windows that flooded the A frame with light. Star Wars viewings in the basement with a bag of Ruffles. The willow tree with its tire swing. The counter where my siblings and I fought over the middle stool for some reason. The dining room table where I made unique homemade valentines for my classmates each year. The stages where I danced. The college where I felt so inspired. The bike rides through a silent St. Paul.

Sitting in the grass, I thought about it all.

And, I thought for the first time in a long while about reading with my mom.

I read the entirety of the Harry Potter series out loud to my mom before I hit middle school. Tucked together in her bed, we’d trade off reading a page, her helping little me sound out difficult words.

We’d often read until my dad kicked me out so he could go to bed (my main indicator that these are very young memories of mine). Oftentimes we wouldn’t have a bookmark on hand to mark our page, so I’d just memorize what page we were on. I remember my mom saying how ridiculous and unreliable that was. But, she was an english teacher, and dog earring was strictly forbidden, so memorization it was.

I remember how she went to bat for me when the elementary school librarian wouldn’t let me check out books above my grade’s AR reading level. “This kid is reading Harry Potter at home!” she chastised. “She can read whatever she wants! You’re going to let her check out whatever she wants!”

When I grew up, she wondered where I got my audacity. Her methods probably came across as Karen-like to others at the time. But I remember how she championed me. How she wouldn’t accept anyone holding me back.

Memories of reading with my mom are some of the most bittersweet I can conjure. They get foggier all the time, but I’ll hold onto them forever.

At base, I know this much to be true: it’s hard to want and not receive. It hurts, badly, to want something so desperately and not get it. It hurts to be reminded that you still haven’t gotten it. And, that’s okay. It doesn’t feel that way, but it really is. It’s human. It’s normal.

Nostalgia can be a bitch, but she’s also a good thing. Evidence of a life well lived, of moments worth remembering. Most importantly for me, my nostalgia is evidence that the infliction of my pain is in my past and not my present.

I have created separation from the sources of my pain that are psychological, not just geographical. Those boundaries hold even when I am back in Minnesota. My nostalgia may ache sometimes, but it can’t hurt me anew. Those people/places/things can’t hurt me again.

My wounds are all from my past, scarred over now. When I go back to Minnesota, I’m simply reminded of what I lost in the fire a long time ago. And, reminded of what I probably never had, anyway. It feels good to begin to surrender to mourning. I’m exhausted from being angry about it all.

I’m thinking now that this might read as sadder than I mean for it to. Or that maybe it makes little sense out of context. I feel like I’m constantly writing around things these days. I’m sure I’ll write directly at it someday. I’m just not prepared for the ramifications right now; my world is so small, the players in the game so obvious. You can use your imagination, if you’d like.

I’m omw!!!

Regardless, now I’m thinking about how someone once told me I write about “such sad things.” Maybe that’s true, but I don’t think it is. Many things worth writing about have a tinge of melancholy to them. Or, at least, yearning. Of which I am an expert.

you only need a word for it when it’s no longer there.

To me, it’s cathartic to write through these things. It even helps me stop ruminating on them. It’s not a sad thing, because it’s my story. It’s the only one I get.

In my imagination, I used to live out alternate storylines of my life like it was my job. Who knows—maybe somewhere, on other planes of space and time, there are alternate realities where I keep my dignity and I do not beg for love and I get back all the time I’ve spent hoping for it in vain. But here, that’s not what happened. That’s not the reality I’m living in. No matter what way you slice it, no matter how many times I’ve yearned to reach back in my past and charm the plot into proceeding differently, there was never going to be a version of the story that went any differently.

These are the cards I was dealt. It’s not a bad hand. I’ll do something beautiful with it.

For now, I’ll be Arizona’s finest Minnesotan.

I’ll save the love letter to Arizona for another time, but let me just say this much: I used to think deserts were barren places. Void. But the desert is an adaptive, life-filled, regal thing. The saguaros stand like sentinels. There’s something noble about them. The mountains at the edge of the valley bracket the horizon in every direction. The desertscape looks like a reef out of water, like some vast ancient ocean dried up and left the anemones and coral to morph into agave and ocotillos. It feels like this shouldn’t be able to exist here, and yet it does. It feels like a place where resilience is rewarded.

I’ve been writing this outside at my favorite coffee shop. The summer heat will be too much for my geriatric laptop and force me indoors any day now, but currently, songbirds are chirping around me. They sidle up to my little table, hoping for a piece of my poppyseed muffin. They are not the birds of my childhood.

When I was young, some robins kept a nest right under the beams of our deck. I remember lying on my stomach with my forehead pressed to the cracks between beams, little fingers pressed to my eyebrows to block the light from obstructing my view. Every day after the tiffany blue eggs appeared, my siblings and I took turns peering down in that manner, waiting for cracks to run through the speckled shells.

I remember watching in awe when those babies finally emerged from their cadbury constraints. Open mouthed. Wanting.

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I want:

-my apartment to magically be fully decorated exactly the way i imagine

-to sear old Olivia Gatwood poems into my brain. exhibit A:

-to never stop appreciating Phoenix sunsets

I’ve been obsessed with:

-strawberries with the brownie batter flavored Granola Butter from Target. you would not BELIEVE how scrumptious.

-a video I saw of someone playing “Euphoria” by Tony Ann on an airport piano.

@raffaelemagliuolopianistsorry for the mistakes but it was not expected🤣 @tony ann #piano #musica #emotional #euphoria #foru #perte #fyp #forupage #passion #pianotok #tonyann #crazy

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-the song “St. Bibiana” by The Shackletons. The lyric, “Say it loud, oh say it proud: I’ll go anywhere with you except St. Cloud” ??? incredible.

I’ve been loving:

-dog earring pages.

thanks for reading ilysm !!!!!