April 18 2025
It's happening. I've been thinking daily on what the next few months might look like. I'll be graduating in almost a month now and I still don't have any jobs lined up. I did have a couple of good leads, however after two targeted applications and a personal career fair invite later, I've come up empty handed. That's alright. I didn't expect the process to be easy, but I did once think that it would be easier than this.
It's April now and it snowed yesterday. A light snow, as if by accident, and it was gone in just the way it came. My roommates and I are leaving too. We decided a number of weeks ago not to renew the lease. We all exchanged our different reasons, but now I have to find another place to live. On the phone, my dad told me that I should consider moving to the Greater Boston Area. In his words, it would be easier for me to find a job there. He could be right.
I lived in Somerville once. It was the summer before I decided to move in with my dad up from Texas. Those were a hot bundle of months, some of the hottest on record, and I would trace up and down the narrow city streets under the June cotton sky in search of meaning. The hours were busy and bustling. People and cars buzzed all about, and the streets seemed to chase and lean on the orange and dusking yellow day. I remember making up my mind that I would move there.
Now, many years and miles away, I am considering the possibility that I will move there once again. What will be different? Will I feel the same? I think now back to how I felt when I was leaving Texas. I had friends and family there, and I was used to the way that things were. I had wanted change. It was deliberate, a purposeful choice. It did not come easy, but it was something that I had wanted. A desire that I had felt in distance, and one that could only be cured with change. But now, I am faced with something new, something familiar. A feeling I haven't felt since I was younger, far and so many lifetimes ago. I'm leaving again, and not because I had expected to, but because growth is watered with change.
I have grown to love Amherst in my time here. I can feel the days heavy and slow in summer, where people from all over go back to where they're from, while the old brick buildings stand and the long green stretches of fields sway empty and quiet. I notice too as people trickle back into town, slowly at first, but while the city fills up, they walk and talk in company, in twos or fours and gander, peering in the windows of every waiting shop. Feel their sweet presence and make note of the careful days, watch how they blend together and quickly pass.
I've grown accustomed to the rhythm of life here. How every day is variable, but still recognizably the same. I've grown used to waking up in my apartment and riding the bus into town. I look forward to each day here, but I'm also curious to see what my life will be like a year from now. Although I had expected to stay in Amherst for at least a year longer, I think that it would also be good for me to leave. I am reminded of my experiences as a child, when things were transient, but the world was only what existed in front of me. We would move often when I was young, and somewhere between the emotional dissonance of my parents' relationship and the altering expanding course of my life, there existed a boy who desired nothing more than stability. To call a place my own. A place that did not exist to be threatened by the uncertainty of change or the impermeability of choice.
Now, as I look toward the future, I am uncertain whether the streets will ring the same, or sound anew, or if, somewhere in the mix of it all, I will land on my feet in a place that feels my own, one that knocks with the familiar comfort of home, or a place that I will have to have to grow to love, to explore with patience, and to understand. I feel that in order to truly belong to a place, you need to volunteer a part of yourself that exists to search and question. It isn't enough to live in a place, to know your neighbors, and to follow your routine. But to truly belong is to demand engagement and curiosity, not just from the place, but from yourself. On returning to Eastern Massachusetts, I expect there will exist a semblance of familiarity, but I also understand that discovery lies not in finding new places, but, as offered by Proust, in seeing with new eyes.