Somewhere, Nowhere, Everywhere
I don’t find it easy to answer the question “Where are you from?”
I lived around Charleston for seven years. Downtown as a college student, Mt. Pleasant for a year after I graduated, and James Island for two years, before I left the city for Greenville. I walked thousands of miles around the peninsula and its surrounding islands. Charleston felt like the one city I know the best in the world. I know all the one-way streets to get to Colonial Park from Waterfront Park. The loud, high pitched churn of the vehicle of the street sweepers woke me up long before the sun rose once a week when I lived in the historic house on Coming Street. I have a favorite bookstore and a preferred Starbucks—the one on Calhoun Street because it was close to work and my coworker and I walked there every morning. I always saw movies at the Citadel Mall theater because it had reclining seats. I liked the way the trees arched over the sprawling yards of the neighborhood behind my apartment building on James Island where I walked my dog, twice daily.
As I discussed two posts prior, I have always left places, an unwanted theme in my life. While I have gone back to visit those towns and cities, and while I have felt a sense of no longer belonging in those places, it never hit me quite so hard in the face as it did in Charleston when I visited recently to attend a friend’s baby’s baptism. There, I was overcome with whatever the opposite of nostalgia is. That is, the landscape felt foreign. There were enough subtle changes, enough things that I didn’t recognize, that left me feeling unsettled. To my surprise, Charleston had kept on growing without me.
I tracked these changes as I drove into town. I noticed the blue emergency call boxes on the Ravenel Bridge to which the joggers and walkers didn’t pay any attention, leading me to believe these boxes have been around for a while. The budding community park with basketball courts under construction at the end of that same bridge into Mt. Pleasant. New storefronts on King Street—stores I recognize by name but never stepped foot in because they weren’t there when I last was. The mural on the side of a building in Avondale that had been painted over.
Subtle and uninspiring changes, yes, but they stood out against the familiarity of the over-crowded Trader Joe’s parking lot. They felt like big changes as I drove parallel to the sidewalk path I walked every day during the Covid lockdown for fresh air, a five-mile circuit that stretched from my apartment complex into the I’On neighborhood and back. It was betrayal personified as I drove from I’On (which coincidentally is where the Orthodox Church the baptism was held was located) to my friend’s house in West Ashley for the post-baptism brunch.
All clear signs that this was not the same place I left, and it would continue to evolve without me, not matter how often I visited.
I am obsessed with the idea that a person can be from nowhere and somewhere. I don’t find it easy to answer the question “Where are you from?” How to answer something so loaded? Do I answer it where I felt the happiest? That was in Dallas. Or where I’ve lived the longest? That’s South Carolina. Or, do I say I’m from California because that’s what’s on my passport?
I was born at Sharp Mary Birch Hospital in San Diego and was delivered by the same doctor who delivered my sister a year and a half prior. I pass by Mary Birch whenever I head up the 15 North when I want Mexican Fiesta, the best place to get rolled tacos in Mira Mesa. We moved to Dallas when I was seven. On hot Texas nights, when we’d breathe in a dry eighty-degree heat, my family and I would go to Babe’s Chicken Dinner House, a restaurant that wasn’t much to look at on the outside but offers the best fried chicken and chicken fried steak of your life. At least, it did, twenty years ago. During wild, Texas thunderstorms, my parents opened the French doors that led to the front porch and we’d all—my parents, my grandparents, and my sister and I—cluster there to feel the electricity in the air, sitting on the edge of the storm, the rain pouring down around us.
In Houston, we lived in Humble, silent H, for seven months, May to December. We lived in a one-story home, and it was cute. It was tucked back from the street, hidden between the trees, almost like it was part of nature. Unlike Dallas, Houston was green. Greener than any place that I had lived until then. There were walking and biking trails throughout the neighborhood and they were covered in huge oaks. Some of the trails had little parks off to the side: a swing set, a teeter-totter, a roundabout. I loved exploring.
I got my first period at Kemah Boardwalk in Houston. At a late lunch of seafood, I went to the bathroom. When I pulled down my pants, on some basic level, I knew what had stained my underwear. However, I pulled them back up forgoing peeing to get a very serious question answered. I unlatched the stall door and mazed my way back to the table where my family sat. I leaned down into my mom’s ear and whispered, “I need you to follow me right now.” Back in the bathroom, I locked us both into the handicapped stall, unbuttoned my pants, and yanked them down. I pointed at my underwear, which hovered at my knees, and said, “What is that?”
We moved back to San Diego that Christmas break (it was always during our school breaks that we moved) because my mom said we’d been away from home too long. None of us were happy in Houston. My parents fought often, and loudly. They’d been fighting for years at that point, so it was nothing new. The frequency in which they fought, however, was. So back home we went.
In San Diego, my dad worked nights, my sister was off being a teenager, so it was just my mom and I. I think my mom and I were the most miserable during this time of our lives. On Fridays, when she got off work, she and I would go to Mexican Fiesta and order five rolled tacos with Mexican guac and Mexican Cokes. We’d hit up Redbox at the same 7-11 from which my parents bought us Slurpees when we were younger. On those nights, it was just her and I and our apparent loneliness: her ongoing marital issues and my friendlessness. We moved to Columbia, SC two years later.
When I moved from Texas to San Diego, the kids in my class asked if I rode a horse to school or took baths in the “creek down yonder,” ignoring me totally when I told them I was from San Diego originally. In South Carolina, they asked if I could teach them how to surf in Charleston, a city I knew nothing about at the time, because they assumed all Californians knew how to surf. I didn’t. Californian’s thought I only wore cowboy boots and South Carolinians thought I only wore Vans.
I was the new kid in school six different times. Sure, six isn’t a high number in the grand scale of infinite numbers. It is, however, when it’s broken down this way: I introduced myself thirty times at five separate schools—as in, I stood up in front of classes full of strangers and told them my name, where I moved from, and three fun facts about me. The fun facts were always the same: I had one sister, I liked to read, and that I was originally from San Diego. I convinced myself being from California was cool to people in Texas and South Carolina and would make them want to be my friend. It didn’t.
I went to four different middle schools, and I showed up at my last middle school in South Carolina on the first day after Christmas break. I only knew my classmates for four months before summer break. When we started high school the following August, people I recognized from classes the spring prior looked at me like they should have known who I was but couldn’t place where they’d seen me before. To this day, I don’t know which is a worse torture, publicly sharing three facts that aren’t really fun at all in front of strangers thirty different times or having to sit next to people who reintroduced themselves to me during group projects even though we sat next to each other in Spanish the year prior. Probably the latter.
I have strong opinions on what good Mexican food is (as in, I don’t eat it much here because there is no place that meets my standards and I am left disappointed at every restaurant); I don’t use the contraction “y’all”; once, my cousin told me I had a slight southern accent; I am also told often that I don’t sound like I’m from the South, specifically because of how I say the word “soda”; I don’t think there is any place with worse humidity than Houston; I don’t care for Southern food but I will never say no to a fried shrimp basket with hush puppies; I dream about California winters (and springs and summers); I put “the” before major highways, freeways, and interstates. I am shy in the face of unfamiliar situations, lost touch with people I used to consider my best friends, and I have no childhood home to go home to on holidays. And yet, I know that I can overcome the things that hold me back because I’ve done it time and again.
I am a collage of all the phrases, habits, and experiences I collected from every place I lived.
So, where am I from? I’m not sure I can answer.
In Charleston, I established roots strong enough to tie me to a place. That’s probably why all the changes I saw stood out to me so aggressively. It’s easy to return to a place that felt temporary at the time I lived there—San Diego, Dallas, Houston, and Columbia. Calling Charleston home is something I take pride in because it was, at the time, the only place I’d ever decided to live. Going back and feeling like an outsider in was shocking and unfortunate. Yet, I know now it was bound to happen.
Hopefully, I’ll get to a point where I am okay with all this uncertainty. I will be able to go back to Charleston and find excitement in learning the new things I didn’t know about it. I will be mature about it. For now though I will mourn what I’ve lost. It is a loss after all.