On leaving blankets behind

I hate moving. Hell, I hate traveling, and I'm generally pretty fond of seeing new places and new things. I am, you see, a big fan of stability and the uprooting that is necessary for moving, or in a small way, for traveling, upsets my sense of equilibrium. I could easily get all psychotherapist on the issue. My distaste for travel probably stems from my household insecurities, themselves derived from my childhood in a bitterly dysfunctional family. Or, perhaps, it has its origins in having to uproot myself at the tender age of six and moving away from all the warmth and family that I had ever known in China to the far more lonely, terrifyingly alien Maryland. It didn't, of course, help matters any when I had to leave Maryland yet again after just four years.

Those of you who've had to travel a great deal in your childhoods are likely a) unsympathetic or b) highly sympathetic. I'm either whining about some inevitabilities, or sharing a pain you understand keenly. In many ways, however, staying in one place just long enough to make friends is more even more painful than not staying long enough to really meet anyone. If you haven't put down roots, after all, there's nothing to tear up when it's time to go. I loved China, I loved Maryland, and even now I love Blacksburg. I have memories and friends here - twelve years worth, in fact - and I know the streets as intimately and reflexively as I know the cliche that is the back of my hand. The town is a warm blanket I've wrapped around myself over the years. I know its scent. The way its texture changes from South Main to Downtown is second nature to me now. It hurts to be thrust from this intimate familiarity into that terribly lonely, terrifyingly alien place that is New York City.

And yet, that is what I have chosen. Nobody told me, really, to go. If I so choose, I could stay in Blacksburg forever and earn well enough to keep me content. Given time and even a little effort, I might even be able to find love here...or at least within the region. Being a college town, after all, there are plenty of people my age. But blankets, no matter how varied in their colors and textures and scents, are still small spaces, and we cannot grow if we constrict ourselves in them. Many of the kids I grew up with find the town suffocating, and that's true as well. Even more than China or Maryland, however, I feel that my childhood lies within this sleepy little college town. And as any college student may appreciate, that moment when you leave a childhood home behind, well, that's an event both jarring and liberating, bringing with it equal measures grief and anticipation. It's a necessary pain, I suppose, in a world that promises far greater bumps and bruises and, yeah, deeper wounds to come. It's funny, how pain is somehow an inevitable part of growth.

So I choose to leave, to accept this pain, and hopefully, to grow. I continue to think of Blacksburg as a secure little blanket, waiting any time I need it, whenever the world gets too alien and too terrifying to bear. And I leave childhood behind.