What if I never leave?

I’m reading a book about a woman who travels. She’s the opposite of me. She has lived in seemingly a thousand different places and seen parts of the globe that I’ve never even imagined visiting.

She frames it as a wild journey, running from place to place to place to place for decades. A desperate fleeing of her circumstances, the endless search for self.

I am jealous. I burn with envy that she is witty and articulate and has a passport and friends whom she can visit, dipping in and out of their lives on a whim.

But she only sees what she doesn’t have: a partner or a husband, her name on a mortgage. She frames herself as immature, an object of pity. How odd she is to be couch surfing at her age, when everyone else has settled down, moved into the trappings of adulthood, has stopped the childish wandering.

And I am stuck. Sitting at my dining room table to devour her book while slumped on a half-broken hand-me-down chair. A chair that was purchased to fulfill someone else’s taste. A chair I cannot afford to replace, and so I have to ignore how ugly it is, how useless.

I’m stuck in the city of my childhood.

I have never had the opportunity to leave, except for a brief stint teaching English overseas.

It was always intended to be temporary, a fling of adventure between graduating from university and getting married. A five-month ordeal of undiagnosed depression and anxiety and drinking too much alcohol. A torturous winter of sleeping for fourteen hours a day and not speaking to anyone for days, feeling out of place because I am at least three years older than everyone else in the program, and in your early twenties that makes a big difference. A blur of homesickness and temporary insanity and getting punched in the face one night when a man tries to mug my friend. I recognize that his pistol is fake, so I try to push him into traffic and he hits me, landing a solid hook to my right cheek and leaving a dent that you can still see today when I scrunch my cheeks up to smile.

But I have never had the option to live anywhere but here. Locked into staying in my hometown at eighteen, forbidden from applying to colleges outside of my city due to financial constraints and the iron will of my widowed mother who raised four teenagers by herself.

And now that I’m forty-three and middle aged I wonder if maybe I should have just run away from home after high school? Run off to New York City where things actually happen to people? Where life gets lived?

But I couldn’t. I didn’t.

By the time I was eighteen I had a boyfriend I loved, and I knew even then that he was a kind man and would be a good husband and father. And so I stayed, locked into my small little life, dreaming of moving away to anywhere else, jealous of everyone I knew who got to “go away to college” and live their own lives. I thought I would get a chance later.

And now it’s too late. I have children and pets, my name on a mortgage, elderly mothers (my own and my husband’s) who rely on us for companionship and help and stability. I can’t just pull up stakes and abandon everyone. But neither can I capriciously take a job across state lines and move my entire family on a whim. I am stuck.

And so I read this lady’s book, fear and jealousy and heartbreak churning in my gut. Glad for her when she finally settles down, finds a house of her own in a city that she loves, feels her roots growing and the calm of middle age settling in… she gets her happy ending.

What if I am well and truly stuck here? What if the furthest I ever travel for the rest of my life is Dallas? What happens to me if I die in this city, never having truly lived a life of my choosing? What, if anything, changes for me?

I don’t want to contemplate that question, because it hurts to think about, but the answer surprises me… nothing. Nothing will change.

I will still love my children and cook dinner and read library books and knit. But most of all I will still write. I’ll still burn inside each day until I get the words out.

Maybe traveling the world isn’t a prerequisite for being a good writer.

Maybe I’m not missing anything at all.

Maybe I should bloom where I’ve been planted, instead of feeling rootbound and resentful.

Maybe I’m just fine. Maybe…