The Nomadic Desire to Return to Home

Wherever you are, that’s where you’re going.

Next month, I will have lived in Athens, Georgia for 11 years. It is the third-longest number of years I have lived in one city.

• Mattoon, Illinois: 17 1/2 years
• New York, New York: 13 1/2 years.
• Athens, Georgia: 11 years.
• Champaign, Illinois: 4 years.
• St. Louis, Missouri: 1 1/2 years.
• Los Angeles, California: 1 year.

I’m visiting Los Angeles this coming week, and I will see my lifelong friend and podcast partner Tim Grierson. This month, it will be 31 years since we graduated from high school together, when we left everything we had ever known behind and started entirely new adventures in entirely new places. Tim went to the University of Southern California after he graduated and has lived in Los Angeles since, which means he has only lived in two cities: Mattoon, and LA, two cities that do not, uh, have much in common. His life has a clear dividing line: The small town he grew up in, and the huge city he became an adult in and will presumably live for the rest of his life.

What I remember most about our senior year of high school — my final year in the town where still to this day, at the age of 48, I have lived in longer than any other — is desperately wanting to leave. Some people who grow up in small towns want to leave because they find the sensibility oppressive, or even actively hostile; their goal is simply escape. But this is not why I wanted to leave my hometown. I love my hometown. Most of my family still lives there, the house my father built to raise his family in still stands there, when I’m in town I can’t go anywhere without running into someone I know. It remains the only place where it feels like I can catch my breath, a place I can slow things down for a little bit, get my bearings, clear my head — the place that does and always will feel the most like home. It has been 2 1/2 years since I’ve was last in Mattoon — the longest I have gone since I was born — and I feel that absence palpably, as if…