There and Back Again: A Relocation’s Tale

As the first keystroke of this [whatever this will end up being] falls, there are 80 full minutes until the last day of the year 2020 begins. It is almost impossible to believe that this year, which has been in essentially no uncertain terms the strangest year of existence for every single human — all of the billions of them — living on this planet, has almost finished running its course. Even less probable than the conclusion of this penultimate day of 2020 was the splatter of happenings that highlighted (note: this connotes much too positive of an experience) life from January through now, into the moment in which you read this. In only twenty-five hours the planet will be in the exact same position that it was in when the 2020 dominoes first began to topple but the world will be in an entirely different place altogether. (We’ll see if this segues nicely into the actual point of the writing or if it’s left hanging like the cold open of some network television sitcom).

A little over a year ago Michelle, Bicki, and I made the roughly twelve hour drive from our home in Charlotte, NC to upstate New York to spend the week of Christmas with our families, a few days in Syracuse with mine followed by a few more in Albany with hers. This, our third married Christmas, was our first spending the holiday like this. Peppered into our Syracuse days were also as many visits with friends as we could fit. At one such visit a friend asked (not really expecting a genuine response, I don’t think), “So when are you guys moving back up here?” My response assured that if we (Michelle and I) both had our way, we would without a doubt relocate.

…The question, then, what was preventing us from having our way in this regard?

— — —

My earliest memories of what has become at best a small personal aversion to, and at worst an anxiety caused by, restaurant menus dates back to dining experiences at Panera Bread during my college years. Staring up at what might as well have been a Green Monster-sized menu board trying to read, process, and assess all forty-plus options against each other while the cashier/order-taker patiently awaits my response after asking how he/she could help me. That decision seemed, and seems today to an even greater degree, crippling. So in attempt to rid myself of the burden of this decision, I chose one item from the menu and stuck with it every time, no matter the meal: a blueberry bagel with some kind of reduced fat cream cheese spread.

So I sat at the Fairmount Panera, blueberry bagel on a plate in front of me (or maybe I had switched my Panera Order to the chicken Caesar salad by that time), with a friend one night during my last semester of college. I was on the verge of graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics and a minor in economics but hadn’t the slightest clue of what to do after walking the stage (figuratively — I had no intention of attending my college graduation, and didn’t). I don’t remember having much worry or feeling much pressure about what would come after graduation; by that time I had started to learn to take things as they came and not store up too much hope in plans which I had contrived. Well at some point that night my post-academic options must have come up because the friend I was with suggested I look into the Charlotte, NC and Charleston, SC job markets as those were places to which he’d look to relocate if he was in my position i.e. zero-to-minimal strings tethering me to the Syracuse, NY area.

Evidently I tucked his suggestion in my back pocket and eventually took his advice because a couple months after graduation I received a phone call during which the job recruiter who called offered me a job at MetLife down in Charlotte (I have the vaguest of recollections looking for jobs on the North Carolina state website, no actual memories of applying for the MetLife position I would eventually accept, and pretty vivid impressions of that interview process (when initially contacted, I had no desire to take that job or even relocate but I figured I’d take the free interview experience)). During the weeks between the initial phone screening and the eventual job offer, my outlook on the prospects of moving to Charlotte did a 180 (I don’t remember much about how this looked, internally-speaking).

So but anyway on August 11, 2014 five of us (my dad, brother, and sister plus my best-friend-since-kindergarten who decided to take the plunge with me) departed Syracuse for Charlotte. We learned of Robin Williams’s tragic death at a gas station Burger King shortly before stopping for the night. In late morning-early afternoon of August 12 we moved into our new apartment, my family who had made the trip down turned around to head back, and the next chapter of my life began. I remember the wonder and unlimited opportunity this new city (as well as my naivete, probably) seemed to offer. I remember the butterflies in my stomach when I’d wake those first few mornings, half wondering where I was and half wondering if I’d made some mistake in moving.

Somehow, in the blink of an eye, over 5 years had passed, 5 years which I never quite appreciated enough:

Perhaps my experience in those first MetLife years was tinted by the rose-colored glasses you can only ever really sport when you’re just about to embark on your real life but working there was a true pleasure. It was not the ‘what’ so much as it was the ‘who’ that I loved. The people with whom I spent forty hours a week became near and dear, but that didn’t prevent me from taking them for granted later on, never quite realizing how important they were to me until after I was no longer regularly seeing them. Life was never the same.

With MetLife came Michelle. We met on August 19, 2014 (after somehow missing each other in January of that year at a math conference in Baltimore which we had both attended and presented at); my first impressions included mild confusion/even milder feelings of being creeped out by her letting on that she knew that I “too” was from New York, even before I had the chance to tell her where I was from (i.e. she had done some ‘research’ on me prior to our meeting) plus I thought she was very cute and I wondered what her availability might be like. It turned out that at that time her availability was non-existent but here we are, a blink of an eye later, married for over 3 years, after being engaged for 6 months, and dating for over a year before that. Life was never the same.

So many other dear friendships were made with people that I met in Charlotte. It’s senseless for me to try to put into words what so many people there have meant, and mean, to me; I could never adequately describe the memories we share, the love that was built, or the lives that were never the same.

Job transitions, friends in new dating relationships, our church changing its meeting place, friends moving away, friends getting married, friends having babies, etc. all in the five-plus year-long blink of an eye.

— — —

During our Christmas trip to our families’ places in New York last year, I experienced a growing realization that we only get one of these lives like this. And even if you live past the life expectancy your mortality would predict, life passes in a single, uttered flash of a strobe. And it goes without saying that that much is never even guaranteed us.

Earlier in 2019, my paternal grandfather was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Mere weeks passed between his diagnosis and his death, Exhibit A of the fragility of life. In his life’s later years, my grandpa was accompanied at many, if not all, of his doctor appointments by my father. I remember wanting to be there for my dad in that manner when the time comes, something I was powerless to do from some seven hundred miles away in North Carolina.

The year before, in 2018, my dad required “routine” heart surgery (it’s hard for me to apply adjectives like this to things like heart surgery) to correct a genetic condition. He’d had years of forewarning, plenty of time to prepare, meaning I, too, was able to plan for it, travel, and be at the hospital with him during the procedure. This blessing of convenience was not lost on me; I was entirely aware that it did not require much imagination to come up with a scenario where he (or anyone else in my family, for that matter) required emergency surgery (emergency anything, really) with not as much time to spare or plan, which could prevent me from being there with and for him.

Leading up to 2018, during my first few years living away from my family, we had our share of other emergencies — some of which I was fortunately able to be present for but there were others when I was left disconnected from my family, entirely lacking any ability to share physically in their hurt or provide physical comfort. Despite my stoic nature and (probably foolish) reluctance to seek help and comfort from others, I knew I was also missing something as a result of the lack of proximity to my family.

(Note: this is completely ignoring all of the happenings within Michelle’s family during these years)

— — —

All prior visits with family, whether I traveled up to New York or someone came to see me down in Charlotte, would end in pretty much the same way: the emotional butterfly-cousins of my early Charlotte days would make their home in my stomach for awhile as I readjusted to life without my favorite people close by. As we hit the road early one morning late last December to drive back to Charlotte, the butterflies made no exception. However, there was something more to them this time, some greater substance to their being. The question “So when are you guys moving back up here,” the response which I knew to be true that we would both love to (move back), and the ever-amplifying revelation that we only get one earthly life would not, collectively, leave my mind. So I asked Michelle what, in her mind, moving back might look like. And that’s how we began wading through that decision together.

Further consideration brought us to point A: we both knew in our hearts that we wanted to permanently live closer to our families, and eventually to point B: we knew we would be relocating to Syracuse which would put us much closer to both of our families. We had resolved to not let any potential detractors (e.g. the sale of our home in Charlotte or employment issues) keep us from where we knew we were supposed to be. (Note: we were extremely fortunate in that our home generated plenty of interest from potential buyers and we were both able to keep our jobs).

Due to the circumstances that had been firmly cemented by the time in 2020 when we were ready to tell our friends our plans, we were unable to share our news with, and say goodbye to, a lot of people in the ways we would have otherwise preferred to do so, had we had more standard circumstances with which to work. But the conversations that we were able to have probably went exactly as you would expect: bittersweet reactions complete with primarily shared happiness for us being able to live closer to our families but also sadness beckoned by the difficult goodbyes.

— — —

It turns out that we had our way, nothing holding us back, and we made our choice.

When we left Charlotte on July 17, 2020 I don’t believe I had truly considered all we would be missing in moving to New York; I’m certain that I still don’t appreciate the magnitude of the things that we can now never experience. Relationships that will crumble over time due to not being able to provide the upkeep they require over such long distances and busy lives (not necessarily for lack of trying either). Friends we will never talk to or see again. When I think of Charlotte, I am met with little stabs of nostalgia and longing but on the whole, I feel a general sense of happiness. But what Charlotte means to me today is not what Charlotte will mean to me a year from now, just as what it means to me today is not what it meant to me a year ago. The perspective will shift over time, some happiness soured after coming to terms with the possible lives that never got the chance to be lived and some sadness sweetened by the chance at a life in New York that we didn’t even realize we were missing while living in Charlotte.

As far as I can tell up to this point, life is lived within each and every moment we encounter while we still draw breath, and one’s life is made up of the collection of all of these little moments. To the extent that we truly have any say in which moments make up our life’s tapestry of moments, life must therefore also be made up of countless opportunity-costs and trade-offs. For Michelle and I to have the opportunity to get more moments, both big and small, with our families up here, we must sacrifice the opportunity to be there with our grieving Charlotte friends going through the pains of separation, divorce, deaths of loved ones, and more; we are sacrificing the opportunity to be close-by as our dear friends’ children grow up and future children are born; we will sacrifice all of the little moments, unnoteworthy, rarely ever even recalled, which make up a life. This is the decision we made, and we would make it again every time, despite never being able to know all that it would require us to forgo.