WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
I was doing this for me, and that’s what mattered at the end of the day. I was putting on my oxygen mask before trying to help my neighbor.
August 2021 ~ August 2019 ~ January-August 2021
People say anticipation is worse than the actual event, and that sometimes you can be your own worst enemy. Unfortunately for me, the thing I do best is anticipate the worst and overthink my every move.
Returning to Providence after nearly seventeen months away was something I dreaded. Before being sent away into the wind, I had viewed Brown University and the city that held it as an oasis. As someone who both recognizes the importance of change and holds disdain for even the smallest one, I knew my time away would leave me facing more than just another year of undergrad. Things change with time, and time moves on whether or not you’re present to endure it. My favorite small businesses were gone. Two classes of students I had grown to love were gone. So much of what I remembered Providence and Brown to be was gone.
I knew it couldn’t possibly be the same as it was before, given the state of the world and the time that had passed, but I wasn’t fully prepared regardless. When I finally came back, mostly against my will, Providence wasn't the way I remembered it. I’d fought to stay in my home state as long as humanly possible in light of this. No matter the mental gymnastics I did to prepare myself for returning to a changed city, a city almost guaranteed to be foreign to me, it still broke my heart to see the unchanged skyline.
Two months in, I’m starting to wonder if the changes the city underwent without me were what I actually feared. Maybe what I feared was that I had changed equally so. I feared that my changed self would no longer fit into the puzzle the way she had all those months ago. Perhaps I feared that she was wiser and more aware of harm and all that’s bad in the world, and I was worried that these conflicts couldn’t be separated from what was—that an image of the past would be tainted in the process, and that the oasis was gone when it was arguably most needed. That’s something I’m still trying to figure out.
Reconciling these concerns cannot be done overnight. To understand where you’re going, you have to be at peace with where you’ve been.
August 2021 ~ August 2019 ~ January-August 2021
Sometimes I wish I could remember the first time I arrived in my hometown. I was a baby, of course, but first impressions matter. Maybe if I had a first impression to recall and hold dear, I wouldn’t have fought so hard to get out. The last impression I had before I left for college may be the most relevant, but I’ll always long for a first.
My hometown is a rural community outside of Flint. I spent a good chunk of my childhood in Flint, visiting family and working with the community, but Lapeer was home at the end of the day.
The resentment that grew within me for my hometown wasn’t the stereotypical disdain teenagers adopt toward life. It was about what the town meant and how it defined me: rural, first generation, and low income, to name just a few. I know now that these are not damnations, but they do leave a trace wherever I go. What felt worst was that these words were not merely words when I was moving through my life there, but rather the explanation for why I had to work harder and farther to achieve the goals I had for myself.
The people around me had internalized these labels and had become them, which in turn made them treat me differently for refusing to do the same. I was told that my goals were unnecessary, barely attainable if attainable at all, that I would be better off staying local and learning to be content—you name it, and I’ve heard some variation of it.
The people I did let in, let get to my head, left more marks than one. Unresolved conversations and conflicts with people who linger in your inbox, promising to talk it through when you get home, can fill you with an indescribable emotion. You’re left to hold the image of that place, that “home,” in a way that feels like it’ll be the solution. The solution cannot be where the resentments lie, however. Especially when you return home to someone that isn’t there.
To be clear, I no longer resent those who attempted to hold me back or stifle who I was. I feel for them, I worry for them, but most importantly, I’ve moved on from them. College was my chance to relocate to a place where my immediate surroundings would better facilitate my goals.
When I left Lapeer for Providence as a college freshman, I wept the kind of tears you find in a 19th century novel. I let tears fall down my face as I thought about my childhood dog I left buried in my backyard, about the pain I was leaving in my wake to be unresolved for what would turn into years, about the uncertainties of what could happen to loved ones in my absence, and for so much more. But I was doing this for me, and that’s what mattered at the end of the day. I was putting on my oxygen mask before trying to help my neighbor. It wasn’t selfish, as I’ve learned now, but rather what was meant for me.
August 2021 ~ August 2019 ~ January-August 2021
I was thrown back to Michigan before I had reconciled with who I turned into every time I found myself there. Evacuation forced me to reckon with my past upon impact. The pandemic had scattered our campus community to all corners of the world and locked us there. I was no exception.
Wrestling with myself and my past was not a welcome chore, so I found myself bouncing from relative to relative throughout Michigan while I held myself hostage there, avoiding a changed Providence. My longest stint at my sister’s home in the suburbs turned into a living situation when I met a man.
The first time I saw the Grand Rapids skyline, I was on my way to my second date with a man I met on Bumble during the pandemic, against my better judgment. The skyline distracted me from our gridlock-traffic-induced discussion about the ethics of mined gemstones. When we reached the peak of the highway ramp going into the city, I looked out over the skyline—a few buildings scraped the sky above everything else, a winding river cut the city in half as far as the eye could see, and the neighborhoods held generations of stories I would never know. I saw Providence. It was Providence at that moment. I knew this wasn’t true, of course, but some part of me wanted it to be. A part of me became homesick for a place I was actively avoiding. Discarding the discussion, I apologized to my companion and spent the rest of the ride staring out the window in awe. He likely thought it was the effect urban settings had on rural girls, but that wasn’t the case. I think I explained it to him later on, but by then I was staring at stars in the planetarium instead.
Grand Rapids became a haven for me before I knew it. It marked the halfway point of my college career, hundreds of miles away from my campus. It became a hub for a relationship with a man I had met due to circumstance and had fallen in love with.
When we would go for walks downtown, it felt like worlds were colliding. I was holding the hand of a man I knew within the confines of Michigan, but would look up and recognize the brutalist architecture reminiscent of College Hill. The vibrant murals when we turned a corner reminded me of my view from the Rock, and the pieces that lie in wait when you walk down Thayer. I knew the roads better than I knew my reflection, and got behind the wheel for the first time in years on them.
This was the beginning of my romance with Grand Rapids. It houses my romance with this man, but I yearn for the city habitually independent of him as well.
I learned to love Grand Rapids the way I loved Providence before everything changed, despite my time there being shorter than my time in Providence. I loved myself less there, but, in true accordance with my brand, I tried to blame myself for that digression.
When it was time to return to Providence, I was cautiously enthusiastic. Grand Rapids had broken down most of my apprehensions by reminding me about what I loved and missed most about Providence, but I was leaving with more to grieve. I had found a new community of support that I was scared to leave behind, not knowing what I was walking into. Exchanging a place where I was always welcome for a place where I wasn’t sure I would quite mesh with anymore wasn’t a risk I was ready to take.
The last cross-state train ride to Lapeer was filled with a wet hanky and my reflection in a window filled with water droplets. The weather was sympathetic that evening.
August 2021 ~ August 2019 ~ January-August 2021
I didn’t cry this time when I left my hometown. I was cutting my summer short. My kitten cried in confusion, perched in the front window as my family backed out of the driveway at four in the morning, but I didn’t weep. I think this time my tears were already spent on Grand Rapids. Instead, Lapeer has become bittersweet. There are remnants of my tainted past, no doubt, but now Lapeer serves as the connecting leg of my trip to my newest love.
A group of people, rather than individuals, are the loves I don’t talk about often. Leaving the whole hurts the most to leave, because they hold more than any singular person or building could. I’m a conglomerate of the places I’m continually leaving behind. Some people see pieces of their loved ones in themselves, while I see the places I’ve left behind, in hopes to find an excuse to return to them again. Life would be much easier if I could pack these places up with me when it’s time to go through growing pains again.
AUTHOR: Juliette Woodcum is in her third year at Brown. She’s reevaluating her role in the worlds around her and will welcome any listening ear or cup of tea to help her in the process — preferably bring both.
ARTIST: Ashley Castañeda is a Latinx illustrator in her junior year at RISD. She is probably taking a well-deserved nap somewhere.