Feels Like Home.

Published from the airport.

Friday Lunch Special will be back next week!

I am sitting in Austin on a very familiar patio that I haven’t hung out on in over six months. There’s a cocktail slowly melting in front of me named after a street I can look out and see—a South Lamar. It’s tequila, lime, and grapefruit and tastes like summer in Texas when served over ice. 

I contemplate getting my headphones out and putting on Waxahatchee’s Cerulean Salt but I decide against it. The sounds around me feel too familiar, and I feel like my midsection is getting squeezed by a perfect hug from the Texas sun and breeze and flora and fauna. There’s a leaf blower working at tidying up something I can’t see. Girls who just got in from “Laaaaaas Angeles” are deciding whether they want to go to the pool or to get a burger from my favorite local fast food chain across the street. They get in a car, deciding on a third option unknown to me. 

The elevator dings, someone splashes in the pool, a conversation happens over a happy hour burger a few tables away from me, just out of reach for eavesdropping.

It’s the ambient noise of a place that I know and that knows me. The sum of each of our parts hasn’t changed all that much, but I know nothing stays the same after the hand of time passes over it. 

I remember how I felt here in the last months I called this city home—restless, drunk on emotion, ready to flee, desperate to get out and get through it. I was unsure of whether or not I had made a horrible mistake, ready to blindly believe I hadn’t until proven wrong. 

Thankfully the decision I was about to dive into was a wonderful one that involved moving closer to home, slowing down, getting my brain in a better place, and untangling my worth from my career. 

Right after moving the question I obsessed over was whether or not home could be everywhere you’ve lived. Nashville didn’t feel like home immediately, and I worried that if Austin didn’t either I would feel unrooted from some part of myself. 

Now, almost three whole years later, I know that the question that was more helpful in the end is this: Can a place feel like home if I don’t live there? 

Home, I’ve found, lies within me now. There are bits of Austin and pieces of North Wilkesboro, NC that I bring with me every time I step foot onto a plane. Central Virginia, too. Every place I’ve ever lived or enjoyed builds up the idea and the feeling that defines home. 

And when I’m in Austin, seated on my favorite patio after a week filled with some of my favorite faces in the world, I am also missing Nashville. 

I am working my way back to contentment and finding it more often than I have in a long time. 

The answer is yes, anywhere can feel like home, and in fact home can be found in individual moments. 

This week I found home all over the place. 

While laying in the dark on a friend’s sofa, watching the new Guy Ritchie TV show he’s already seen, just because he wants to share it with Tucker and I. Eating the wrong Halal dishes that a delivery person brought by mistake. Three identical containers of shawarma chicken loaded french fries, as delicious as it had been if it was the right order. 

At a bagel shop getting my regular order, flanked by two of my favorite people on God’s green earth grumbling about this and that. 

In the color of a friend's hair that matched her overalls, in breaks between hugs we can’t seem to stop giving each other.

In the people who saw us on a patio somewhere and turned the car around just to say hello and then sat for hours on end as the sun and the sky changed from morning to afternoon. 

In the skee ball machines at the best arcade on the planet, robbing Tucker of his 10,000 point throw, with a cooler full of Miller High Life tall boys in the car if we want ‘em. 

In the cracked voice of a friend as he reads an essay out loud about hummingbirds, and in the shared space when we both welled up at the end because it’s too beautiful to get through with dry eyes. 

Over lobster and mozzarella bites, catching up over oyster tattoos and the best lobster roll I’ve had in a long time. 

In every “I can’t believe you’re here right now.”, in every “It’s so good to have you back again.”, in every “Nashville seems to be treating you well”. 

I feel it there when someone asks “Do you live in Austin?” and I say “I used to live here, but I don’t anymore.”

Little pieces of home are around every corner on visits to Austin, and I really hope that never changes. 

P.S. I wrote this for Mary Bryce of Strange Horses because I said if she published today, I’d publish today. She’s the girl whose hair matches her overalls in the above.

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