Migration

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My family and I moved around quite a bit. In my earlier years, we only moved around Southern California, but, near the end of my high school years, we eventually moved up to Western Washington, just outside of Seattle. Moving was always the same experience. There was the balance of dread and excitement, the seemingly immense amount of labor that would result in you placing your things in the same order, just in a new space; there was the journey itself, which culminated in the repetition of past redundancies, coupled with a fleeting sense of newness; and there were the goodbyes, which for me, were selfishly ignored entirely until the moment of departure. 

 

Most of Southern California looks the same, so moving around there never feels like you've gone all that far, even if there are many hours worth of distance: we were surrounded by desert, lightly forested hills, and close to a beach regardless of where we were. It was the move north that felt new. An 18 plus hour drive and lush plant-life made Seattle feel like a foreign country. Of course that feeling resulted from a failure in my imagination to realize how truly large this planet is. If I have learned anything from moving, it's that my mind has a tendency to conflate its world with the world at large, and that, in fact, my world is a narrow pound by comparison.