I started writing this blog post at the end of July, but the last two months have been like one never-ending, 40+ hour week, full of so many serving and bartending shifts that I hardly knew what day of the week it was and I often considered just sleeping in my car in the parking lot. But amidst more customer service than I ever thought I’d be willing to take on were so many celebrations and incredible people and travel throughout the east coast that it hardly felt unmanageable. (I probably wouldn’t have told you that in the midst of my sleep deprivation.) But seriously, I found the best job in Ocean City. And the best people.

Summer has ended like a slamming screen door right in my face—and I’m here digging out my sweaters and flannels wondering why it didn’t at least leave a note or something, trying to intellectualize time, figure out how it works the way it does. Or maybe why. One minute, we’re at the beginning of something and the world is new and full of dusty possibility… Just a few moments later, we’re wondering where it’s all gone. And now what?

I entered Ocean City feeling like I’d be totally out of place—like my priorities or my interests or my values wouldn’t align with anyone I’d find in a trashy, tourist party haven (I say trashy with complete endearment). Like I’d be lonely and sick of working all the time and missing home. As I’ve written about before, I didn’t understand what compelled me to move here in the first place. In fact, no part of living in Ocean City sounded very appealing. I only knew that it was something that I needed to go through with because my gut told me so, because the idea came randomly and intuitively. Because I have so much faith in that guidance within me.

Mid-July, I made my first trip home since I’d moved. I planned on staying for a day or two. But after about the 4th day, I realized I was already planning on how to move back. I hate it there, I told my family. I want to come home. Person after person asked me how the beach was, and I stopped being able to pretend that I was enjoying it. “You’re living my dream!” they’d say to me, all wide-eyed, and I couldn’t have faked a smile if I wanted to (but I didn’t). It’s not what you think it is, I’d tell them. I miss York.

One of my friends said to me finally in the midst of my bitching: “Well, you always bail anyway, Lizz, so why don’t you just come back?” His comment hit me and stuck—crashing in and out of my mind each day after. You always bail anyway. Over and over. I think the word “flaky” was thrown into the conversation somewhere. And something along the lines of committing for once in my life… I laughed a little too hard at his opinions, almost clinging to them with a smug sense of pride. I do what I want, I said. Who says I have to be anywhere, do anything. Commitments aren’t my thing, I told him. I’m free.

But what I didn’t say to him was that I didn’t feel free; I felt stuck in the decision I made. Foolish. When I finally started driving back to Ocean City, I remember repeating to myself over and over down the first stretch of highway: you can still turn around, you can still turn around. Because I could have. I knew that nothing critical was holding me anywhere. And yet his comment replayed in my mind. You always bail anyway, Lizz. Why don’t you just come home? In and out.

Around thirty-five minutes outside of York, my GPS took me off an exit that I’d never encountered when making the drive before, immediately rerouting me back onto the highway in the opposite direction. My vision as soon as I got off of the ramp was a fork: one sign read York, one sign Baltimore. Like some physical manifestation of my decision in my face. The signs could have read: "growth" and "comfort," and I knew that even then. Knew that as I approached the exits and weighed out my options:

1. Bail on my job in the middle of summer, leave my roommates (one of which I’d convinced to move down with me), pay out the rest of my summer rent for nothing, and lose out on tons of money—but get to go home.
2. Breathe through my discontentment, accept what homesickness feels like, and give it some time.

I chose Baltimore, and I drove back to Ocean City. Begrudgingly. Miserably. I almost walked out of my job more than once that week in self-righteous rage.  I was unwilling to be grateful for the opportunity. And as hard as I tried not to be, I was angry about everything. I hated every happy family I waited on, having to consciously remind myself to smile. I hated the room that I lived in—the ceilings too low and the bed too short and the space suffocating. I hated the crowded streets and each person I was introduced to and I wasn’t making “any money” and there was nothing for me in that town.

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.” ― Beryl Markham

When I think back on my feelings then, I can’t quite access the root of my disappointment or what expectations I’d held that had been shattered so desperately, but I couldn’t get out of it for days. More than all of the outside circumstances, I was most angry at myself. I was angry for missing home, for always hanging on to things as if letting go would leave me desolate and alone. I was angry because I was aware that my thoughts and my emotions were creating my reality, but I couldn’t change my mindset. I was angry because I knew that I was forgetting what I've learned again and again: that by accepting and letting go, I’m given more than I would have ever thought to ask for. That by accepting and letting go, I'm taken care of and guided and at peace.

But it was that anger with myself, that struggle with acceptance, that was keeping me stuck. There was no trust in the space that I was in. I wasn’t allowing myself to just feel what I felt; to remember that I was supposed to be exactly where I was. Sitting on my porch on 14th street in Ocean City crying for home. Crying for purpose. Crying for clarity. Crying for comfort. My panic and indecision were just the usual: fear of the unknown. And I see now, like two exit signs coming up on the highway, the lesson that I was being pushed into: are you going to do what you always do—run away—or are you going to try something different?

No part of me wanted to stay in Ocean City in early July. No part of me wanted to sit with my homesickness and wait for it to pass. It was a feeling I didn’t recognize or understand. A month and a half before, I’d hardly felt like York was home anymore. I was dying to leave. And that week I was aching for home in every moment—at times deafening and suffocating enough to make me hold my head and wait for it to dull, at times just a quiet, steady thump like my father’s hammer on a wooden board outside in the garage.

“Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in street look not just indeferent but ugly...perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is real sickness—the ache of the uprooted plant, the breathing method.” ― Stephen King, The Body

But it was that night on the porch, crying to my niece, that I remembered. I remembered that it didn’t matter where I was, and it didn’t matter who I had there. I remembered that wherever I go, there I am. And here I was, frustrating defects and all, wanting to run back to York thinking it would make all of my unexplained feelings go away, thinking I had some greater purpose there that couldn’t be fulfilled in Ocean City. I remembered that my purpose is always the same: to keep growing, to love others, to be of service wherever I find myself.

I wish I could think of a less cheesy way to describe what happened after that night, but I’m telling you, I woke up the next morning and the damn sky was bluer. And each day, my perspective widened just a little bit further, blossomed really, and I fell more and more in love with my life again—and more importantly, with my life in Ocean City. In just a few short weeks, I made friends with everyone around me (who had been there all along…), so many of them from entirely different continents and yet with mindsets and goals and passions that aligned with my own. I found places of peace within the constant chaos, some of them miles away or across state lines and some of them right around the corner. I found home. And it was only because I’d let myself crack wide open. I’d let my homesickness breathe. I’d let the light come in.

♥♥♥

About halfway through August, I started getting questioned about when I was going home—from my family, my friends, managers who needed my availability, customers at the bar… Each time when I told them mid-September, the original plan, the date that seemed so impossible to reach before, I felt like I was lying. And then one day it was clear to me that I wasn’t leaving mid-September at all.

I'm finishing this post in the tiny apartment of a friend I’ve made this summer who has turned into more like a sister to me. I have found a home within her, too. Last night when I picked her up, she was crying. She’d just said goodbye to one of our friends who was leaving Ocean City officially in the morning. She said to me (and I won’t get these words right or capture her charming Croatian accent): “I just can’t help it. I’m not sad; I’m just wondering how it all happened so fast. Just thinking about all the small memories. And we’ll never get them back; we’ll never have them again. This is why it’s so important... We have to live.” She was both panicked and calm; both grasping and accepting. I had tears in my eyes myself because I understood exactly what she was feeling. She wouldn’t have had to say a word. I’d just been sitting at home living in the heartbreak when it’s not even all the way over. Clinging to the end with breaking, bleeding nails. Fumbling to capture it all and trap it in a jar, sit it on the nightstand beside me in my attic.

There’s still time left before this town goes completely quiet. But one of our friends left yesterday. One left today. And almost everyone else that I’ve met here who have helped this place become home to me has a scheduled departure coming up any minute now. It’s like watching a trail of dominoes collapse. I know that I’ll turn my head for just a second and they’ll all be gone. The tourists that crowded every nook and cranny of this place, they’re mostly home, too. There’s just a few left lingering by the boardwalk pier, clinging too to the end of summer while the ocean threatens to wash it all away.

My scheduled last day in Ocean City was September 10. It’s came and passed. I’m still here. And as usual, I have no idea what my plan is. I have no scheduled date to “go home” anymore because I’m not sure where that is. Each time that I’ve visited York since that trip in July, it has felt like home a little less… And then a little less… And then a little less. So for now, I’ve given up on trying to figure it all out. I still have no idea why I'm compelled to stay here longer. It seems like any time I get some glimpse of clarity, it vanishes like a mirage. I try to catch the answers like they’re tiny little fireflies in front of me, but when I open up my hands to see them, there’s nothing there at all.

I haven’t seen that fork in the highway since that night, either. My mom tells me she’s not sure that it’s actually there. (I’m not so sure either, but I can assure you that I saw it.) And though some days I can hardly handle the ambiguity of the direction I need to take, I know that I’ll know when I'm supposed to. I know that I’m being led. And how lucky am I to realize that if I get too lost, I have a hometown that will be right there waiting for me, a place I don’t think I ever would have appreciated without this experience. How much luckier still that I can rest easy knowing that with an open heart, I will find home wherever I go.

♥