goodbye checklists for cinema hometowns
the trouble with rootlessness. making a list of all the people and places i'll be sad to leave. seeing 3% of the world. two tethers (exploration and nostalgia). the romanticization of knowing no one.
Last year, around this time (in late August, the most sorrowful and violent moment of summer), I wrote about the routine of leaving. Saying goodbye to places that feel like home. Swearing that this is the last time I will be sitting on this beach, driving down this road, standing in this parking lot. I will probably come back. I will not be the same woman. This beach will not be the same beach.
I climbed up Lanikai Pillboxes with a friend I have known for eleven years. Heart beating heavy in my chest, sunglasses lopsided along my nose, never quite used to hometown Augusts. The hottest month and the most violent. After, we walked to the nearest beach access and took off our shorts and hats, fanny packs and water bottles. I know this beach. I have been to this beach a couple hundred times and I was born a seven-minute walk from this beach. There is very little beach left - a result of sandbags, rising temperatures and rising waterlines, desperate rich transplants trying to save their houses. We leave and I am certain that I will never be back to this same beach. I say a proper goodbye (meaning: I say nothing, it is uneventful, the clouds continue moving).
We have a contemporary obsession with rootlessness. Social media romanticizes and glamorizes it, and I have always been well-suited for this fame. From remote work to long-term travel, we are taught to idealize the act of leaving. Leaving means arriving somewhere new. For middle-class Americans with a powerful passport and a modest savings account, rootlessness is within reach. The new American Dream - no more white picket fences and perfect families and red minivans, just the freedom to leave. In the age of the ever-impending apocalypse stability seems increasingly impossible - instead we idealize constant movement.
I am accustomed to the routine of leaving. I am good at saying a proper goodbye. I try to think about how this is the last time I will be standing on this beach as this woman. Change is a beautiful and personal and powerful thing. I try not to think about how there will be tangible places that I will never stand in again. That’s scarier and much more sorrowful (something I could only dwell on in late August).
I am good at packing light. I lose belongings every time I go home. I lose more every time I make a new one. In the three weeks before I leave, I put on my favorite perfume twice a day and light my favorite candle every night. Strip away the excess. I am good at keeping checked luggage below the weight limit.
I am good at rootlessness. A personality of tender indifference and a talent to leave. I think it may be what I am best at. I am good at standing on the beach at a distance. I will only be here for a season.
I sit in my childhood bedroom on a Friday night and consider if we are meant to be rootless in our twenties. I am on my third cover letter of the week and no closer to genius than before. I fear (like most people in their early twenties) that I am wasting my twenties. I think of all the nights I have spent feeling alive - in cities across the world, in college apartments, with friends and enemies. I think of how many more nights I will spend feeling alive and tell myself that I have so much time (then wake myself up wondering if this is how you lose track of time - by telling yourself again and again that you still have so much of it). I am not where I thought I would be and that’s okay.
I want to scream at my phone screen when I see strangers on the internet romanticizing loneliness. The privilege of aestheticized, worldly loneliness is rarely acknowledged. To leave is to have somewhere to return to - stability. Rootlessness is exhausting (new cities, new train schedules, new friends, new almost-lovers, new beaches, new sights to see, new checklists, no lists of places to say goodbye to). I drive down a street that I have known my whole life and recognize my face in the mirror. I write about girls onscreen who don’t. I wonder if strangers in my phone screen lust after the laziness of hometowns. I know that it used to be different and someday it will be again.
I am writing a book about the end of the world in a recliner where I used to write about all the ways I would change the world. I will be leaving in less than three weeks. The house may be there (it may not). The recliner may be there and it may not, and if it is I will be a different woman. I grew up and I am still there at the same time. I thought the world was ending ten thousand times over and it didn’t. Maybe we have always felt this way. This is the first summer where I have been good at routine, meaning it is the first summer where I haven’t felt something strangely apocalyptic in the air. The temperature records and the daily news indicate that it might be the most apocalyptic yet, but it doesn’t sink into my bones. I feel hope and ambition and childish joy most days. I try to be kind to myself on days when I wonder why I am not where I thought I would be (I try to be kind enough to tell myself that seventeen-year-olds don’t know where anything should be).
I am good at rootlessness, but the three weeks before I leave are always the hardest. I make an itemized list of all the places I need to see one more time before I go and drive to half of them. I will return but I will be a different woman and I will be arriving at different places. I climb up the mountain above my house and listen to Noah Kahan sing: I’m not scared of death // I’ve got dreams again. I am seventeen again and I don’t know any of the strangers in my stories again (it is a different year). Now we climb mountains together, drive through new countries, return to places we love.
I think about returning to Iceland. I think about returning to my hometown. I feel a leftover adolescent sense of betrayal (I was not supposed to return when there is so much of the world left to see). I download an app that quantifies that number. Three percent. A handful of decades to see 97% of the world. I see the attraction of the rootlessness, the wandering, the bitter unsettled loneliness again like I did before turning twenty-one.
I climb up the mountain above my house and listen to Noah Kahan sing: A minute from home but I feel so far from it. I am gasping for breath, red dirt under my nails, the satellite view of my hometown below. I think about all the places I have ever loved and the thought of knowing them. I think of the impossible vastness of the world and turn around and keep going.
Excellent piece. The thing about hometowns is that when you return, it's always home. Even if you have a home somewhere else. A hometown is like a first love. It has an intensity that others rarely match.
Jessie, you write with a fresh, unique, and strong voice. I feel you will become a known voice of the time and not just for your generation. You have something spectacular to say and in the way you say it.