There’s no telling when Austin became home for me exactly. Which is strange considering how often I find myself missing it. Strange because I was all but consumed with where I might go next while I lived there. I was making new friends, establishing new routines, and planting roots while also waiting for the wind to catch me and fly me away to Europe over the summer. I’m not as good at “getting settled” as it seems, so I blamed it on the heat. I guess, in a way, I was obsessive about protecting this idea I have for my life needed to remain temporary enough to leave.
Travel is too important to me. It’s become a load-bearing pillar of my adult life and I rely on the dreaming and planning and experiencing of it too much to try to pretend that I don’t. Or that I can ignore that need for any period of time for any reason… or person. I like the interruption of departure. It’s all I know, in a lot of ways. It’s all I’ve ever known—in more ways than I may ever be able to convey here. I like airports more than any sensible person does, I think. I like learning a new city through my daily routines. I love the moment when the veil of unfamiliarity in a new place starts to lift itself. I like knowing—trusting—that whatever shape my life takes, there will always (hopefully) be stretches of it lived somewhere else.
Wanting to go home doesn’t change any of that for me. If anything, it confirms it and it’s that confirmation that makes it all that much more interesting. This isn’t the longing I usually associate with travel. Longing, for me, feels like the soul reaching outward toward something or someone or some place else. Like, somewhere else I want to go, something else I want to see, or another version of my life that might exist past wherever I currently am. I hate it, sometimes, but even when I am perfectly happy somewhere I find myself dipping in and out of the daydreams of Elsewhere. This time, the longing is pointed backward. Inward.
I miss Texas. I miss a lot of obvious and totally ridiculous things. I miss the way my life organized itself there. I miss the people. I miss my people. I miss my own (known) space. I miss knowing where things are because I put them there. I miss the random chats from the new acquaintances you casually make on your evening walks. I miss the Lady Bird Trail—crowds be damned. I miss the farmer’s markets and their hodgepodge selections. And, as ashamed as I am to admit it, I miss the convenience of being able to run essentially your entire life from your phone: patch up the grocery haul, do that Target run from the sofa, and call the Uber into town.
Of course, there are things I miss with considerably more force. There are specific moments and specific people and certain versions of specific evenings, characters, conversations, and routines that I hadn’t even seen as significant until I was out of it. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, what can I say? But that’s a whole other Sunday.
I’ve spent most of my life thinking of home as the place one leaves. I inherited a completely different definition of home than the one I hold now. My earlier definition was one of “family,” “history,” and obligation. Home was somewhere I had responsibility or some place that knew too much about me. Home was the place I left to see who I might be elsewhere. I almost don’t know how to accept or deal with the truth of it all: I’m homesick for Austin. Holding space for and processing the ebb and flow of gratitude in that truth, that I am homesick for somewhere I’ve chosen, is a real conscious daily practice.
From Ireland, Austin feels like somewhere the different parts of my life have begun to converge and less like a city where I just know I have an apartment and comfy place to land. Austin is somewhere that my work make sense. Hooch makes sense there. There are different relationships that I want to continue to invest in there and there are habits that support me that I actually want to stay long enough to see through.
I am sure I’ll wake up one cold February morning with the desire to be somewhere else and there will be summer afternoons when Texas feels actively hostile to human life. And I will still leave for work and for pleasure. There are just too many places I want to see, too many places to return to, and too many people I still need to meet. It’ll just feel different—lighter—without the burden of saving me.
There’s more to that than I am prepared to share here. But I know that not every feeling needs to be resolved the moment it appears. You can’t satisfy every craving. You can’t quench every thirst. It’s enough, for me, to just be mindful of where my attention is reaching.
There’s real irony in all of this coming up in Ireland for me. This place taught me over and over again that my life could be larger than any earlier version I’ve ever known. I come here and rediscover connection, movement, possibility, and a wider worldview each time. However, I’ve learned that expansion does not require endless motion; belonging does not require a container; building a life does not mean surrendering the right to explore everywhere else.
I can still fantasize about friendly reunions in Italy or Czechia or Portugal or plan for next summer in another European city I haven’t met yet. Or at least I hope to. This world is just too big and fun to not follow one’s curiosity through every cobblestone street of it.
If someone had told me, three years ago, that I would find myself homesick for Texas amidst an Irish summer, I would have been sure and certain that person didn’t know me. Yet, here I am—in a place that has always shown me how much bigger my life could become—mesmerized and motivated by a new perspective. That, maybe for the first time, the most interesting thing waiting for me isn’t somewhere I’ve never been… It’s home.