I grew up in the same area for the first 25 years of my life. Murrieta, California for 20 years, followed by a 5 year stint one town to the north in Wildomar, CA. I knew every nook and cranny of that valley. I knew which back roads to take to avoid traffic on the 15 freeway, or where to go to see the best fireworks. I had watched the city grow from a small town, to the booming almost-metropolis it was becoming.
This past August, I made my first trip back home. I once again drove the freeway I had spent so much of my life driving. Once again, I was a part of the chaos and the business of it all.
I wasn’t sure what I was going to feel. Nostalgia for my childhood? Sadness? Apathy?
What I wasn’t expecting to feel was the distinct sense of detachment. I had moved to Kansas, and Murrieta had continued on as if I had never been there. New buildings had been erected. Businesses that were just taking off before I had left had shut down due to Murrieta’s general turnover rate. I traveled the same roads as I had in my childhood, a stranger now.
Can you spot the Kansas transplant?
While I was visiting California, my mother, brother, and I went out for drinks one night. When showing my ID, the bartender gave it a hard look, apparently caught off guard by the blue plastic as opposed to the typical Californian yellow. Kansas? Who the hell lives in Kansas? I was sitting in at a bar, in a restaurant I had visited often when I lived there, but for all he knew, I was just an out-of-towner, out for a drink.
Going home is hard. You have this new life you have created, that you’ve spent so much time trying to put together. You are proud of who you’ve become, of the work you do now and the friends you have made. You forget that life goes on where you came from.You no longer belong. You aren’t part of the church you spent 18 years of your life at. You are no longer the college student at the local university. You are no longer the patron of your favorite thrift shop, book store, or restaurant. You are not the linchpin in the society like you thought you were. You are an outsider.
I returned to Wichita unsettled. If I didn’t belong in California anymore, and I still don’t quite belong in Kansas, where do I belong?
I was no longer Caitlin of Wildomar, California.
I am not yet Caitlin of Wichita, Kansas.
For now, I will settle for being merely Caitlin of no land, of no specific place.
Except perhaps Caitlin of Planet Earth. I like the sound of that.
And it will be enough to know that I belong there, if nowhere else.
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OLIO MAG 