On moving

I’ll be moving from Indiana to Ohio shortly to start an MFA, an ambiguous move that is currently stretching over several months and making leaving feel both imminent and distant at once.

The current plan is a itinerary of South Bend, Minnesota, Ireland, St. Louis, Omaha, Bowling Green. . . Making leaving less a clear, exact date and more a gradual fading away.

All of this is feeding into tension between teaching, writing, reading, and. . . well, everything else. When you leave a city, you want to find a way to say goodbye to it. The people, the places, and also the rituals you’ve become accustomed to.

I find myself pulled between my desire to linger in the kitchen talking to a roommate. My desire to walk the dog along the river one more time. And my obligation to finish grading the stack of writing assignments that have accumulated (poems. research papers. bibliographies. random everyday journaling I ask my students to do. To see what and how they’re thinking. But which sometimes becomes just a item to check off on their list and an accumulation of papers on mine.)

My longing to read the stack of books growing under my desk. My wish that I was writing at Panera in the morning instead of last-minute lesson-planning (though I also love this— is there anything more adrenaline-provoking than finishing a chapter of a book and lighting upon the exact way you’ll present it to students? The questions you’ll ask and the hare-brained activities you think will get them into the heart of it? Even if, in the end, they don’t?) My need to pack and discard. My sense that I should just sit for a minute and soak it in one last time.

I feel, constantly, the desire to be everywhere at once. My mind leaps to all the things I am not doing and the places I am not inhabiting.

It makes things like prayer and contemplation feel impossible. I can’t settle in a state of mind because I am perptually elsewhere. Precisely at the moment that I want to be right here. The place that I am leaving. The people I am leaving. The whole life I am leaving.

I’ve done this before. What millennial hasn’t? Left a whole place and life behind. Been a nomad in a space and wanted to claim it and abandon it at the same time.

I never thought that I’d live in South Bend for six years. Twelve if you count being a student (twice) at Notre Dame (it’s fair if you don’t— aside from student teaching, it was quite separate). But here I am, somewhat by intention and somewhat by chance.

I stayed in South Bend mostly because of a writing group a friend and I started the year before I graduated. The exact shape of the group fluctuated in the following years, but three of us held steady for six years. Now, however, it’s drifted into the digital sphere, leaving me feel less tethered to this particular place. Covid amplified what was already in motion: the slow fraying of the social fabric, the growing sense that it would take concerted work to stitch back a sense of being fully woven into communal life here again.

The physical proximity of Bowling Green to South Bend makes me feel the move less than I might otherwise: a sub-three-hour drive, mostly cornfields and interstate. I tell myself I can always come back.

But my age makes me feel it more. The last time I moved states, I was 24. I’ve moved from Notre Dame’s campus to South Bend, from one home to another since then, but these have felt less drastic. Some continuity. A natural step: I finished an MA in English at ND, got a job as an English teacher and moved into a house of grad students, then moved less than a mile across the river, job still intact.

Now I’m 32. An age where I have to check to make sure I’m not adding or subtracting a year accidentally. I feel like I should be more stable or tethered to a place. Like I should feel this move more than I am.

I think I will feel it a few months from now. When I’m wandering between cities and states with no exact home. When I finally settle in Bowling Green and make the final cut from South Bend. When the end-of-semester grading subsides and I can finally see what it is I’m leaving.

The last time I truly left a place, I left in increments. I was a young teacher. I’d spent two years in the Pacific Northwest. I was part of a teaching program, which meant it felt temporary from the beginning. We left our placements each summer for classes at the University of Portland, so when I moved out it felt ordinary. When I flew to South Bend from Portland (the day after graduation) it felt abrupt, but also expected.

One of our favorite restaurants in Portland, aptly named

This feels different. Because after the past couple of years the inertia has moved towards staying. Leaving no longer feels like the continuation of the narrative bent I was on. It feels like an active choice to remove myself from this place.

And yet I don’t really believe that I’m going. I’m doing odd things that I never do to soak up the remaining pieces of life-as-a-teacher-in-South-Bend. Chaperoning prom. Doing a choreographed dance with other faculty at a pep assembly. Agreeing to supervise the senior lock-in. Saying yes to social gatherings I don’t really have time for but will find time for anyway.

Maybe it’s a way to remind myself that I was a part of some bigger life here. Or simply a realization that I can say yes to things without fear of being asked to do them again in the future, without being obligated. Maybe it’s what I think it is: a prolonged way of saying good-bye before I actually go, a way of saying good-bye without ever having to say it.

Part of me wants to leap to the other side of it all, to the quiet space of summer with its long hours for writing and reading and walking and rest. Part of me wants to linger in the best parts of life here and never really leave it at all.