I’ve always been fond of the phrase “Geography is destiny.” I’m not sure who said it originally, or indeed, if anyone said it originally or if it’s just one of those phrases that took hold in the popular lexicon of clichés. But I like it. I don’t know exactly how it applies to me, but geography has certainly been intricately tied to my destiny for most of my allegedly adult life. And lately, as I’ve been in touch with people from my past (raise your hand if you’re tired of hearing me talk about that…yeah, that’s what I figured), most of whom seem to have wound up on the East or the West Coast, it’s really been on my mind. It’s not that I’m wondering how I wound up here (and this time I mean “here” in the geographic rather than the emotional or metaphorical sense), because I can follow the path quite clearly. It’s that I’m wondering what I’m still doing here, and how much longer being here will be my destiny. If that makes sense. Which I’m not sure it does.

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to end up here, “here” being specifically a dilapidated ranch house in a dull suburban-style area of a dreary midsized Midwestern city in the heart of Red State Land, but also more generically, “here” in the middle of the country, far from my family, the ocean, overcrowding, more ethnic diversity than you can shake a stick at, noise, four real and relatively moderate seasons, large Jewish populations, good or even acceptable pizza and Chinese food, and other things that feel like home to me. I’m not sure that I was supposed to end up in a high-ceilinged prewar apartment w/riv vu on the Upper West Side, where I grew up, either; nothing I’ve ever pursued as a serious interest would have provided the kind of income that would have landed me in a place like that. But I wonder if there was some sort of happy medium (with a slight eastward bias) that I missed somewhere along the line.

In several separate phases of my life in very different circumstances each time, I have picked up and moved to a completely new place: not counting the moves from NYC to DC and back again that occurred when I was little and had no control over my destiny, geographic or otherwise, there have been five of these major, disruptive, discombobulating moves. Of those, only one was an unmitigated disaster (my move to Chicago during the breakup of my first marriage, an ill-considered decision that resulted in a ragingly horrible experience—that year, and the profound effect it had on me, was originally going to be the main focus of this blog when I first thought about starting a blog, and maybe I’ll get to all that eventually, because there are lingering effects that I try to ignore but kind of can’t). The rest have been successful to varying degrees; I won’t go into details about all of them just now, but all have had their ups and downs.

But in purely geographic (and aesthetic) terms, the one that brought me here to Heartlandsville has been the least successful, and I’m wondering how much longer I can put up with this particular bit of geographic destiny. Love brought me here, and a pretty great job is currently keeping me here, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t occasionally worry that I’m going to be stuck here forever. I doubt that that will be the case, but then again, the idea of uprooting again is so overwhelming that my mind recoils from it when I try to think it through logically. It’s been almost five years since I got here, so I’ve reached the point at which the thought of putting my whole life in boxes and clearing out the detritus that I’ve accumulated and so on is something I can just about begin to contemplate, though even just contemplating it makes me tired.

I’m not, incidentally, equating geography with happiness. I’ve figured out that I can be unhappy wherever I am. :-) And more seriously, I’ve learned that whatever you leave behind in a given place, you don’t leave much of yourself behind; it travels with you. So I’m not looking for a geographic solution to all my problems. (It’s true that living in a house I liked better in a neighborhood that I liked better would make this town more tolerable for me and would temporarily improve my overall outlook—I think— but it still wouldn’t make me feel like this is where I belong.)

Thing is, I’m not sure where I belong. I’m pretty sure it’s back home in NYC, or more precisely in Brooklyn or Queens or Jersey or wherever I could afford, but sometimes I wonder if it’s the idea of living in New York that appeals to me more than actually living there would. On the one hand, I was ecstatically happy the first six months or so after my first husband and I moved to the city; I loved the alive-ness of it, and I was so happy to be able to walk everywhere (and to see a million new things on every walk—other cities I’ve lived in, like Minneapolis, are good walking cities, but you see the same things over and over, which isn’t true in NYC), and having so many options for places to go and things to do made me less of a homebody than I’m usually inclined to be. On the other hand, I got tired of lugging groceries (from the surprisingly cruddy grocery stores in Park Slope—you really can’t beat Mpls.-St. Paul for grocery stores) up three steep flights of stairs; I got tired of the crowds and the expense and the way it seemed to be impossible to set foot outside the apartment without spending $20 on…something, who knows what. I missed things like cross-country skiing and being able to hop in the car and go to Target when I wanted to and having good restaurants that didn’t actually bankrupt you. I missed Minneapolis’s famous quality of life, which unfortunately now costs a hell of a lot more than it did when I lived there. Somehow, though, I now seem to have traded both the quality of life stuff and the excitement stuff: this town has neither. The very best thing I can think of to say about it is that it’s dirt cheap to live here. Oh, and the people are friendly…but since half of them are also far-right fundamentalist types, I’m not sure friendliness itself is much of a consolation.

So where does that leave me? I’m not necessarily prepared to go someplace entirely new again, unless there were a really great job opportunity or it were someplace close to but not in New York; I’m getting kind of old for that, and there aren’t that many cities left that I’m willing to try (other than St. Louis, a city so familiar to me that living there would barely be like moving to a totally new place; hell, I know way more people in St. Louis than I do here). So there’s a very short shortlist. If you count the four years I spent in the DC suburbs as a child, I’ve now lived outside of New York longer than I’ve lived there, and I always swore that that would never happen. But New York isn’t the city that I grew up in by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m not sure I’m prepared to make all the tradeoffs that would be necessary in order to live there. Again, I think the idea of not living there bothers me more than actually not living there, although the pull of being closer to family is very strong. I don’t know. Sometimes when I look into the magic 8-ball, it says “Signs point to Minneapolis,” which is the town that, other than NYC, feels most like home to me because I lived there for 12 years, 12 years that saw a lot of life changes and helped turn me from a lost and hapless twentysomething into a slightly less lost and hapless alleged grownup. But there are problems with going back there, too, not the least of which is a husband who hates winter.

So if geography is destiny, what’s mine? I wish I really did have that magic 8-ball to tell me where I’m going to be next. I hope to God the answer isn’t “right where you are now, sucker.”