I’ve lived in my current city for five years. So, it’s been half a decade now. And what a tumultuous and change-filled half a decade it has been for both myself and the world.

I first moved in late summer of 2019. I had moved for many reasons. I had, prior to the move, only lived in my hometown. I was born and spent the first thirty years of my life there. I had graduated college and found a job that allowed me to pay my bills and work in a big pretty shiny skyscraper downtown. But I still wasn’t happy for reasons I couldn’t then define. I had always felt at odds with the culture I grew up in. But I had also been too lazy, indecisive, and, frankly, too comfortable to make a real move. I reached a point though where I felt like I was employable enough to be able to move and be financially okay. Plus, all of my friends who were going anywhere in life had or were in the process of moving away.

I felt like I had outgrown my current situation. And while I didn’t quite know where I wanted to go next or what exactly I wanted the future of my life to look like, I had a good friend that lived in the suburbs of my current city. I thought, why not go to the city, live by him, and go out together on the weekends?

It seemed like a good enough plan and I was excited for it. I found a job and moved in the late summer after I turned 30. My first weekend there, my friend drove in from the suburbs. We went out and saw a DJ. When we returned back to my neighborhood in the early hours of the morning, before sunrise, we ran along the beach by my place laughing through the still night air.

He crashed at my place and the next day we had an explosive fight. This was the first of many angry shouting matches in the months to come. Eventually, we went our separate ways entirely. I spoke to him for the last time in early 2020. A couple of months later, the world shut down.

These were two losses for me in a row, but I thought I found myself, initially in shallow friends and wild adventures. However, that didn’t turn out to be a lasting or fruitful path in the end. On the other side of that, I can’t say I’ve found myself. But I have found out a truth – which is that life is only as good as the work you put into it, and even then, there are no guarantees. So, I’ve been exploring, putting down roots, and making this city my own. I’ve been going out and meeting people and earning money and living life. And somewhere, overtime and imperceptibly to me, this new city that I moved to years ago in a fit of desperation, began to feel like home.