The Price You Pay.

Pinterest presented me with a quote (by "presented" I mean, I scrolled through Pinterest in my bed for hours to find) that captures a feeling I've been trying to articulate for a very long time. It reads:

"You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for loving and knowing people in more than one place."

I don't know the joy of a parent when they meet their baby for the first time. I have no clue what doctors feel when they save a person's life for the first time. Heck, I barely even know what it's like to live in the same place for more than 10 years.

But I do know that I know a wealth of beautiful, intelligent, empathetic, funny, cocky, insane, competent, lovely people. Whether it's the drunk (and incredibly honest) people on my tour, the Parisians I met in a bar off the main drag in France or just living in the 3rd largest city where I see hundreds of different people a day just on the train going to and from work, I have seen/met a surprising amount of people in my 23 years. I have seen hundreds of distinct wrinkles, heard hundreds of belly laughs, and smelled the natural (or unnatural) perfumes of hundreds of people who have lives just as complex and nuanced as my own. I've argued with men I met 20 minutes prior when they said A Hard's Days Night has no redeeming qualities. I've commiserated with women in long bathroom lines whose bladders are full of cheap whiskey, who want to get back to their friends just as much as I do thus we become friends with each other. I've learned how to say "Fuck off" in French while drinking Absinthe.

Don't get me wrong, there are days when I wonder if I'm happy without a place to call my forever home. I think, "Would having a mortgage make me happier than having a lease?" I have friends with kids and husbands and ex-husbands. When I see the look on their faces when they look at their bundles of joy or their soulmate, I always question my own life. In recent years while I'm thinking this and looking at their pictures or listening to their experiences, I start to notice something familiar. Something that I've known intimately. The glimmer in their eyes isn't just the look of a new parent or a newlywed. It's pure joy. It is the same glimmer I get when I'm improvising with people I love or in rehearsal with some of the funniest people I've had the pleasure of knowing or meeting someone from a different side of the world who I can talk to for hours. It is the look of belonging.

But with all of this comes a tinge of loneliness. Those wonderful moments of joy are scattered in with hours of mediocre moments. That's okay. That makes those big moments so much better.

It gives me solace that when I get to age or a city I want to settle down in or a person I want to settle down with, I know that I have seen as much of the world as I possibly could. I can't regret my lonely 20s. Those years shaped the confident, strong, and worldly woman that I will become. She will not apologize for taking her time. She looked into the eyes of strangers and soon after called them friends. She loved. She existed. She cared. She adored every minute of it. She LIVED.

Thanks for listening. Come back for more.