Where Should We Live?
August 25, 2023
In the early aughts Raymond was the psychic to the NYC media elite. He lived in a townhouse in the west village and his partner would buzz you in and you’d bring photos of your friends and family and Raymond would tell you your life. I never went to him but my assistant went so often I had to stage an intervention and my best friend Dorothy went once and when Raymond saw her photos he pointed to our friend Katherine and said “she will do anything to be married” which turned out to be 100% true, and he pointed to a photo of James and me, newly engaged, and said “those two are still on fire. Tell them Connecticut.”
Who knew that the matter of where we would live would be the defining question of our 19-year marriage? Not us. We left NYC with our hair on fire when JW was 6 months old because JW had colic, I was in the midst of full blown postpartum anxiety disorder and still had to show up at Teen Vogue and be amazing, and we were living in a 1-bedroom apartment. James and I made the decision to leave our lives and careers in NYC one evening where all of life’s major decisions are made: The Dublin House. “I want to move back to Virginia,” I said and James paused, beer half way to his lips, looked into my eyes and said “Okay,” and two weeks later we were loading up all our earthly possessions into a U-Haul destined for my parent’s basement in Northern Virginia. James did a phone interview while we drove down the New Jersey Turnpike and got the goddamn job. One week after leaving New York we knew we’d made a huge mistake, but we lived in Virginia for the next 12 years. Not one day went by when we didn’t discuss where we wanted to live. It wasn’t there.
Moving to Amsterdam was one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me, and probably us. I’ve spent the past 5 years healing, resting, finding joy and inspiration in this magical land that has given me everything my heart could ever desire. But now we find ourselves at another crossroads and the question of where should we live has again risen to the surface.
JW has one more year of high school and is looking at Universities in the US and in Europe. Amsterdam has gotten even more expensive, and our landlord wants to sell our apartment, which needs literally millions of euros worth of repairs — it is a gorgeous gothic masterpiece adjacent to the Vondelpark in Oud Zuid, the fancy part of Amsterdam, and it is crumbling down around our ears. We can neither afford to buy, nor fund this insatiable money pit so we’d have to move and I don’t know if I want to live here if I don’t live in this house. I’ll have to write more about that later — there’s a lot to say about this. We are now eligible to apply for permanent residency here but we have not progressed enough in our inburgering to pass the 5 required tests for residency. Our Dutch is still dismal. I don’t want to talk about it.
Also, I am lonely.
The thing is, I am convinced I am destined to be lonely as I have been lonely my entire life. It is a condition both of my own making and because of how my brain is wired. JW’s late ASD diagnosis has also revealed many things about how my own brain works and why I’ve always felt at odds with the world and the people in it. Since moving to Amsterdam I’ve been intentional and deliberate about who I spend time with, and as a result I spend a lot of time alone. Lately I’ve been thinking I want to be around people more but for me that means being around specific people, and those people live in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Fucking Virginia.
I hate Virginia. I hate the weather, I hate the politics, I hate the racism, I hate how scared it makes me feel for our LGBTQ+ kid, I hate the suburbs and traffic and all the bugs and pretty much everyone who lives there. (I may not hate you, you can ask me if you are worried about it and I’ll tell you.) I hate my traumatic family history in Virginia that spans both my adolescence and post-NYC adult life. I hate the memories it holds. I hate the way it makes me feel. I hate the way it makes me behave. I hate that I keep thinking of it as my “safe”haven for when my life falls apart, when it has never been that.
When it’s sunny out and I’m on Shrimpy I turn to James and say “We can NEVER fucking leave here. If we leave Amsterdam I will die. Don’t ever let me convince you that we need to leave here and especially not to move back to Virginia. Let’s buy a houseboat and sign up to take Dutch classes with the fucking nuns and pass all our tests and get permanent residency and live here for the rest of our lives.”
But the thing is Virginia is calling to me. Again. It’s saying move back and it will be better this time. Move back to Charlottesville, where you didn’t fit in but you found your people and they are all there. You could live in a cute bungalow in Belmont and walk to the downtown mall and get nachos and doughnuts and super good coffee and you can hang out with all your best friends and have fun parties and go the the races and eat guacamole and there are lots of good writers and writing community stuff and you probably won’t have to drive and you know about boundaries, now, and you’ll figure out how to get the hell out of there in the summer.
I consulted tarot cards regarding the matter at the suggestion of my most serious, no-nonsense, logical friend, Jill, and the cards told me to seek revenge but I’m not sure I asked the right question. “You still need more revenge?’ James asked. “What are you talking about, I’ve barely gotten any revenge” I replied.
You can see what James is up against here.
Many places are speaking to me. I have also heard from Portland, Oregon:, Salem, Massachusetts; Burlington, Vermont; Portland, Maine and a few other places. I haven’t heard shit from Connecticut. I don’t know what Raymond was talking about.
Kitty and I contemplating things while relaxing with Robert Plant in the garden