Boston

Whenever I am at peak escapism, the song I listen to is Boston – Augustana. Which is funny, because I never really love Boston that much or thought about moving to Boston. I guess it is just the fantastical romance of it all

I guess 16 years is a good time to revisit a place you thought you’d never move to. I was here in 2006, a student, (a broke, foreign student), a nomad, a twenty-one-year-old who is just as clueless about life as he is driven to strive for a better one, and a deeply deeply closeted man. 16 years could be a lifetime. Kids come out at 16 now. It feels like a lifetime ago. And it felt like yesterday. It felt like another person’s life. Yet, all the little bits of the year in Philadelphia, traveling to NYC, to Canada, to Boston, had become milestones and bookmarks and monuments in the life I have today. 

The last time I travel internationally is March 2020, 2 days before the pandemic was declared and the world shuts down. Plans were postponed and canceled. Life as we knew it was altered. We all wanted to be safe. We all prayed to be safe. We hope that others will be safe (well, maybe the majority of us). And we stayed in place. To be safe. 2 years. 2 jobs. 2 false starts. I am now in the air, to Boston. I had a financial year-end review with my boss yesterday and the feedback was 95% positive. At the lowest of my lows, people reminded me that I am still a high-functioning, beautiful mess.

And I know I was supposed to be grateful to be safe. I know I was supposed to feel privileged and blessed (because I am). I know I am incredibly lucky to be here today. I know all that. I know.

Yet when I look outside the window of my home office, look at the little loops I do walk in, look at the beautiful and affordable city (that keeps voting racist anti-trans conservatives O&G beholden zealots into power), look at the booming tech community (that is struggling to define itself), my life feels small, trapped, insignificant, and isolated. It’s an island of quietness. It’s an island of barely enough attention and safety to survive, but never enough support and love to thrive. It’s an island of social networks and never enough real-life connections. It’s an endless Instagram scroll – beautiful and fun, attractive and engaging, but never really truly means anything.

“Was I safe, or was I suffocating?

Because the bird is in the cage and the cage is in the town and the town is made of blinding white flowers and beautiful lies

Maybe we can’t help the things we dream of any more than we can’t help the things that we are made of

Or maybe we can  

If we can finally the lies and the town and the cage we are inside of, we can see so many other things too

We can see the door – a way out – and we can fly away”

– Little fire everywhere

So, I have a bare minimum itinerary of what I am going to do in Boston. The friend I’m visiting is a homebody who doesn’t drink, doesn’t eat out, and doesn’t love going out. So it’ll be interesting. I love traveling solo, btw. I don’t mind it. It reminds me of that 21-year-old who is clueless and fearless, who is lost and intuitive, who is depressed and hopeful. It reminds me that I can still do it, fly away, to the world that is out there, figuratively and literally. 

And maybe, maybe, one day, I can inspire someone to fly away with me, too. Maybe, just maybe. One day, we can find a place where we can both truly belong, together, where we can grow up and grow old together. 

Without the cage, and the anchor, and the beautiful lies and the deafening comfort. 

Maybe one day we can put the phones down, unplug, and sleep peacefully in an island that is embraced by the endless blue sky, and the family and friends and the people in our lives who love us, as flawed, as sad, as isolated we are at times.

Before the fear in me turned into the unrelenting demon wanting to forever run away from it all and never come back.