I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(51)

Ungrateful bitch!





Sloths on a Waterbed


My friend Corrine couldn’t wait to move into her new condo. The trouble was what to do with the spare room.

We were in our early thirties. Corrine was newly single, and she’d already set up the master bedroom as hers. She could do anything she wanted with the second bedroom, but she was hung up on the idea that she was supposed to have a guest room.

“I want to put a desk in there and build some shelves,” she said. She wanted to be able to leave work earlier on weeknights and stop going to her office on weekends. Plus she’d been bookmarking chic home-office designs for years.

“Do it,” I said. “Build your room.”

“But then where would I put a guest bed?”

I asked if she anticipated having a lot of guests. She said no, out-of-towners almost never came to visit. But doesn’t everyone have a guest room? Isn’t that what homeowners do? And what if she did have guests one day?

“Look at it like this,” I said. “Are you willing to live without your dream office—which you know you’d use every day—just so you can have a guest room sitting there unused most of the time?”

She built the office. If a guest decided to come through town, she could blow up a mattress or get them a hotel room. Arrangements could always be made.



* * *



I’ve come back to that conversation again and again.

I thought about it when John and I started playing with the idea of moving to Tennessee.

Nashville hadn’t cured me. It didn’t change me into someone else. But it did help me see myself and my life in a new way. It helped me remember what it felt like to be me, just me, not lonely-and-traffic-crazed-me. It reminded me that I could change things about my daily existence to make it fit me better, which made me ponder whether there might be a daily existence that fit our whole family better.

Shortly after my summer in Nashville, I got a call from the bookstore. They were looking to do some marketing projects, maybe start an online magazine. They offered me a job, the deal being that I’d do the bulk of the work from afar, commuting up to Tennessee a couple of times a month for meetings or events.

Being in Nashville again on a semi-regular basis improved my mental state considerably. I loved the way I spent my days there. I’d go into the store for a few hours, then have lunch or dinner with a friend or colleague, maybe go hear some music, and do some quiet reading and writing. The city was full of literary and creative types, culturally curious people who shared my passions. The parents of kids my kids’ ages were as likely to be novelists, actors, or drummers as doctors, lawyers, or accountants.

The Jason Isbell song “Alabama Pines” was playing on the radio a lot then, and I always teared up at the line “No one gives a damn about the things I give a damn about.” In Atlanta, I once scored a last-minute pair of tickets to a midnight Brandi Carlile concert at a bar, lucking into a truly rare opportunity to see my musical hero in a small venue. John was out of town, and I called at least ten friends, but no one wanted to go. I ended up going by myself and sitting among strangers. In Nashville, people gave a damn about the things I gave a damn about.

Of course, in Nashville I was free of most of the pressures and hassles of everyday life I had back in Atlanta. I didn’t have a house to take care of because I was always staying at a friend’s place (some people do need guest rooms!). I didn’t have to make dinner for anyone but myself; I wasn’t needed at any school events; the mundanities of active parenthood were not part of my life there. I missed my family when I was in Nashville, though. I wanted to sit down with John at the end of the day and talk. I wanted to take the kids with me to see and do all the city had to offer. Nashville’s biggest downside was that my three best people weren’t there. But instead of thinking, I should go home to them, I thought, I should bring them here.

Part of me felt like I couldn’t leave Atlanta because we were rooted there. That’s where so many of our friends lived, and I loved my friends. But the truth was that I hardly saw them. Atlanta was like Corinne’s guest room—a space I was holding on to just in case it might get used for a certain purpose that, in fact, it was almost never used for. Corinne didn’t have guests 99 percent of the time, and 99 percent of the time my Atlanta friends were too busy with their own growing families and commitments to hang out.

Then there were the practical considerations: The traffic in Nashville was nothing compared to Atlanta. You could zip from one place to another in fifteen minutes. The houses cost less. The schools were just as good as the ones in Atlanta.

We decided to go. John started looking for a job, and I started looking for a place for us to live. I swore to all my friends that the minute they wanted to do something fun—go on a trip, throw a birthday party, see a show—I’d hop in the car and be there in less than four hours. But spending day after day sitting in Atlanta waiting for that life to turn into something it wasn’t didn’t make sense anymore. There was no alternate life taking place in another universe. There was no time machine. We had just this one timeline, and it was ticking forward.

I guess it’s crazy that I thought people would embrace our choice, but it had been such a hard decision, and I was proud of it. It had taken so long for me to accept that two things I believed—“I love my friends here so much” and “I don’t want to live here anymore”—could coexist. To reconcile two contradictory ideas, you have to find a way for one of them to win out, to subjugate one to the other. It drove me nuts that I couldn’t do that with this decision. I loved my Atlanta people and I wanted to leave Atlanta. Both. To make a decision, I had to acknowledge that neither was more true than the other and that my way forward wouldn’t negate either truth. I could love my friends even as I made my decision to go.