Interior Terrain
This personal essay reflects on the years that have passed since I first left my home state of Colorado. This journey takes me first to Florida, then to Louisiana and finally to Georgia, places where my sense of place and meaning of home are forced to evolve. Full story coming in 2022
Chapter One: Initiation [excerpt']
My first year in Tallahassee was an outward success. I had passed all my classes, established a friendship with my roommate and got to connect with her network. I made some connects of my own on campus and some friends from back home in Colorado came to visit. As summer settled in, the city got quieter and the truth of my decision formally introduced itself. Had I really moved all the way to Florida to live in a city I had never been to before, where I knew no one? This little tiny town? Did I make a mistake leaving my family? Sure, I felt lonely back home, the way any broken-hearted teenager from a broken home would, but was it worth moving to the other side of the country? Without the crutch of that familiar blue mountain backdrop, my loneliness became suddenly more pronounced. It was thick and heavy, like the humidity of summer afternoons in Tally.
One distinct difference between my loneliness in Tallahassee and my loneliness back home is that in Colorado, my loneliness didn’t have a home. In describing her experience leaving her home state, bell hooks “felt like an exile, as though I was being forced to leave the landscape of my origin, my native place because it would not allow me to grow, to be fully self-actualized. Both the inner world of family dysfunction and the outer world of dominator threatened to suffocate my spirit.” More than once in my adolescence, I was uprooted and plopped into a new family. Even when it stung a bit I knew as a child that where I lived and who I lived with wasn’t up to me. It was up to my mom, often depending on shifts in her relationship status.
My last year before leaving Colorado was spent living in an available room in my mom’s latest husband's house. The bedroom was technically mine but half the things in the closet weren’t. Like the rest of this family home, the bedroom had remnants of relationships that had passed and stories that had ended, most of which had nothing to do with me. And yet, I was living in the debris. In my first apartment though, in this Tallahassee townhome, the common areas downstairs were shared, but upstairs in this bedroom I was in my domain. Everything in both my closets belonged to me. Everything under the bathroom sink, everything in the shower was mine. Everything, even that heaviness in the air belonged to me.