the real reason

When I've been telling people I'm moving, I guess I've been spinning the reasons differently depending on who I'm talking to. At work it's been all about my aging parents, and how I need to be closer to them, because how could I leave a job I'm so well suited to for another job? It has to be something other than career, it must be family.

But anyone who knows anything about US geography knows that I am moving nowhere near my parents, I am going back to the midwest which is my home but it is a two-hour flight to get to Mom and Dad, who live in the West, in a place where I have lived before but that is not my home. So for those people I sometimes focus on the career opportunity angle, more than the family angle.

For the cousins, the family angle is no problem because they in fact do live quite close to where I'm going to be, and they understand how it's our ancestral home, even though I've never actually been to Appleton before.

But tonight, finally, someone really got it, and really understood why. Perhaps because she's known me since a few months after I moved to Sydney. She has known me during the hope and promise of my move here with my ex with our Terrace House dreams, the dot com collapse of my career, the fun but also disappointment and frustration of my unemployment, then his retreat into his office so that he would no longer leave his computer screen for anyone or anything. She stayed with me during the pain and absurdity of the break-up, and was right beside me doing every new thing I explored to rebuild my identity - came along to my talks at the Philosophy group, met up at the Art Gallery, traded DVDs and books, invited me to take the poetry class. She's met all my funny new liaisons, my new friends. She's been right through the narrative with me, and so she understands how this makes sense.

It's not for my career. It's not for my parents, altogether. It's kind of just a happy coincidence that so many cousins happen to live nearby. She described my real reason back to me tonight, with real insight - it's because of what I've been through here, and that Sydney still has a tinge of pain, and I need to start clean and be in my own place, and start something new all of my own.

She's a writer, and a life-long studier of narrative. Of course she would get it. Of course she would be able to tell the story in a way that makes sense of it. She's the only one, so far. But I'm so glad I've been able to see this move reflected back as it makes narrative sense in her eyes. It makes it seem much more right, now, and hopefully will ease some of the heaviness I've been feeling for the last few weeks.