This week, I learned there’s nothing like taking an excessively long trip back home to make you remember why you ever moved away in the first place.
I come from Santa Barbara, California.
Sometimes referred to as the American Riviera, or heaven on earth, the town of just 90,000 residents is known for its wide beaches, majestic mountains, mild climate, colorful Latino culture and top-notch dining establishments. The narrow strip of land, located about an hour-and-a-half north of Los Angeles, is considered a premier resort destination where people come from all around the world to soak up its spectacular views. It’s a playground for the rich, famous and beautiful, and sometimes when the thermometer reads below zero degrees, and it’s snowing outside of my Boston apartment while my friends and family back home are spending their warm, winter Southern California days sunbathing at the beach, it’s difficult for me to remember why I ever left.
Then I remember, unfortunately not usually until after I get all the way to my mother’s Southern California home after a full day of travel via planes, trains and automobiles, that coming home, even to one of the most beautiful places in the world, is comparable to taking a trip to hell on earth.
For starters, there is nothing I want to do less than coordinate dinner plans with parents. Unless, of course, they are picking up the tab, in which case, I’ll have the steak. Still, even when my dad offers to treat me to dinner, I can’t decide if the conversation is worth it.
Yes, Dad, I’m still unemployed.
No, Mom, I don’t have a job lined up for when I graduate in December.
Yes, Dad, this is a new tattoo.
No, Mom, I am still single.
No, you guys, I’m sorry, but I’m not moving back to Santa Barbara when I finish school.
Toward the end of the meal, they exchange looks of disappointment, and maybe concern, and I flag down the waiter and ask to see a dessert menu.
Perhaps what’s worse than having to admit to my parents that I booked a three-month trip to Thailand for after I graduate, fully funded by financial aid and for no more reason than to prolong unemployment, is having to tell that kid from high school that I never needed to see again.
Which brings me to the problem of Santa Barbara being entirely too small.
I come from a place where taking a trip to the grocery store comes with a 110 percent chance of running into someone I know. And that kid who I had one pre-calculus class with doesn’t just want to throw the casual nod of recognition in my direction. No. He wants to stop and hear the unabridged version of the past 10 years of my life while my ice cream melts in my hands and I am forced to absently answer the same questions that everyone I know has spent the past two days asking me.
“Do you like Boston?”
“How’s school?”
“What’s the weather like over there?”
“What’s planned for when you graduate?”
“Are you coming back to Santa Barbara when you finish school?”
“Are you dating anyone?”
Good god.
If we were really friends, you would already know the answers to this tedious and tiresome list of brutally pedestrian questions. And if you don’t already know that I’m single and unemployed, figure out how to use social media to stalk me like an adult. You could spare us both the 20 minutes of forced small talk in the CVS parking lot. Really, that casual nod of recognition will more than suffice. I promise.
Listen. I understand that palm tree-lined streets, infinite ocean views, perpetual sunshine, beach days in January and dinners on dad’s tab are hardly anything to complain about, and it’s not to say that my trips home are total misery. My beach walk this morning with the biggest cup of black coffee a girl could ask for was enough to remind me that I am a very lucky girl to come from a place that many people only know as a vacation destination.
What I am saying is that there is such thing as being at home for too long. Typically, for me, between days four and five, I find myself saying, “I need to get my ass back to Boston, immediately.” And when boredom leads me to start texting my ex-booty call between days seven and eight, I start considering booking an early flight back to Boston.
The beauty of calling a new city home is that I don’t have to have weekly dinners with my parents, defending my unemployment or my singlehood. I don’t have to worry about running into old high school classmates and co-workers on a late night In-N-Out Burger run.
Instead, I’ll just continue to brag to my new city friends about where I come from and admire Santa Barbara from Boston because, really, it’s so much prettier from a distance.
