“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
Indianapolis, IN
The Indianapolis skyline sits in a vast bed of pink pushing down on blue, and I’m caught in the sunset, in the liminal space between night and day, clinging to the fleeting warmth of the sun as the moon crushes down on me. A lanky,
excitable man on the cusp of middle aged sits down on a tree stump with his daughter and points to the escaping sun and its casted light over the skyline with a childlike wonder exceeding that of his daughter’s. “Look at it, look how beautiful it is!” he kept repeating, and I was left to wonder if I could see the city, see the sunlight the same way he did.
John Green once said that the reason he loved Indianapolis was precisely because it wasn’t easy to love. You had to stay here a while to see it’s fruits. The problem is, my hometown was so easy for me to love before I left it, but now I’m finding it exceedingly difficult to love. I feel like a tourist, looking at the city from a bird's eye view, stuck on the same sightseeing tour where everything is vapid and repetitive, and nothing is mine and I am no one’s. After moving to Nashville, I expected coming home to be a joyous reunion with all the people I’d missed and to pick right back up with life as I’d left it, but instead I returned to fractured relationships and empty weekends. Once you move once, you can’t go back to a life that’s lived entirely alongside you.
On the way home from the park, thick grey sheets of rain started pouring down at a speed my windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with. My eyes magnetized onto the falling drops, and I thought about how much our sense of belonging is tied to a location, but also how much it doesn’t need to be. Instead of relying on a place to provide me with lifelong friends and an entire life to revisit upon each arrival, I get to carry the best parts of a city and its people with me wherever I go. I pick them up like raindrops collecting on a window, like snow falling on a rooftop.
When I moved I was unaware that I had simply taken the best parts of Indianapolis with me; I may not belong there anymore, but I still belong to what I carry. Even if that just means carrying the memory of a girl who made me feel safe on the elementary school playground, carrying the feeling of what it meant to be a teenager on the varsity cross country team, carrying the sound of scratched voices belting praise around a campfire.
But when this comfort is hard to grasp, I find myself escaping.
Off the Monon Trail
Under a canopy of outstretched greens I explored this remote space further than I had before, until--along the banks of the White River--I came across a small hut made out of sticks from the forest it inhabited. Labeled with cracked orange paint, the hut was a collaboration of weathered branches, leaf-dusted spiderwebs, and broken beer bottles barely held together by the hands that had built it. The names of travelers were engraved onto the supporting beam, a semi-permanent reminder of its very non-permanent residents.
In my solitude the presence of the hut felt like an invitation to belong, right here in Indianapolis on the deserted banks of the White River. And at that moment I realized it wasn’t Indianapolis I had grown weary of. It was what Kurt Vonnegut called “the terrible disease of loneliness”, because of course one cannot go from a tourist to a comfortable dweller without a welcoming hand. Indianapolis didn’t feel like home because I hadn’t felt welcomed like I did when I left, but also I hadn’t done an upstanding job at welcoming others, which is, I think, the essence of belonging.
Maybe I'll never truly belong in a singular place or with a steady group of people, but I don’t think I can escape belonging. I’ll always have the pieces in my pocket. There will always be someone willing to provide refuge for strangers. So we have to try our best to do the same.
When I think about the moments in which I most belonged, it was when I felt known and valued, and without the people who possess that remarkable skill of freeing others to be their most true and boring selves, we’ll never find that. So here’s to welcoming, here’s to a hut for strangers, here’s to seeking the moments in which we belong.
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