Three months ago, I felt lost, moving through the same routine every day. Wake up, move to the couch, call a friend to lie on the couch with me, maybe eat a meal or two. My mind told me to stay and fight through the pain of the heartbreak, but my body needed the one thing he said I was weak for. The town and the people that raised me.
So I booked a flight, planning to stay a week, just long enough to figure out what my life was. A week became two. Two became three. I had to return to Boulder to pack away the life I’d built there the year before. I’d planned to travel all summer, as if running from the ache in my chest could make it disappear. But the ache came back the moment I landed in Boulder, the knowledge that I wouldn’t see my family, my friends, the cornfields that knew me better than I knew myself, for another month. So without a second thought, I canceled my flight and drove thirteen hours back to my roots.
With every hour that passed, the anxiety in my body dissolved. By the time I got home, I felt normal again, like the girl who’d disappeared years ago had come back. I spent the next month forgetting what had made me lose myself in the first place. It was the best month of my life.
Then my second trip back to Boulder came around, and I made the drive with tears in my eyes and a weight in my chest. I packed up again, telling myself I wouldn’t come back. I said goodbye to the people and places that had healed me, that had picked me up every time the ground tried to pull me under. But that first night in Boulder, I lay awake wishing I was in my best friend Alli’s bed, laughing at TikToks until 4 a.m. Or at Crusens till close, surrounded by the people who always knew how to make me smile. So by morning, my mind was made up. I hadn’t even lasted two days away from home. The place I’d run from had become the place I ran back to. So I packed my car and drove the thirteen hours again.
I’ve been home for another month now. I have two days left before I have to return to Boulder for school, and it feels like the first time I ever left. I’m scared that I’ll never shake the feeling that nothing will ever feel like home the way my small town does, the way the friends who’ve known every version of me do.
The summer that was supposed to be spent in Boulder turned into a summer of running, running from hurt, running in circles, running thirteen hours at a time. But every road led back to the one place that never once failed me. My body knew what it needed before my mind could catch up. I’m still learning to listen to it.
I won’t stay away from my little town for too long again. Not because I have to, but because I finally understand what it means to be from somewhere.
Illinois, you are my home and my soul, and I’m sorry it took me so long to admit it. Alli, my family, everyone who’s ever made a spot for me at the table or the bar or the couch, I’m done being a stranger. No matter how far Boulder pulls me, I know exactly where I’ll come running back to.