On Home (Leave)

that extended twilight between one life and another

the descent into San Francisco

Nick and I have officially left Egypt. Very unceremoniously, I might add. We literally crept out in the dead of night, leaving behind an apartment full of trash because we spent too long taking shots with a neighbor while we should have been packing. (In our defense, it was Johnnie Walker Blue, and he’d been saving it for a rainy day). We won’t move to our next post—Amman, Jordan—until later this month, and meanwhile, we are on “home leave.” Home leave is when the State Department makes you return to the U.S. in between assignments. The idea is that being back in America will remind you of how great things are here, therefore keeping you from going native overseas. We have malls! Mexican food! Mini golf! What could be better? 

The funny thing about home leave, though, is that it leaves you feeling home-less. Nick and I don’t own a place in the States, so we’re doomed to trespass upon the hospitality of family, bouncing between my in-laws’ house on the East Coast and my mom’s on the West. And so, friends, I found myself on the curb at San Francisco International Airport on the night before Christmas Eve, awkwardly dragging four fit-to-burst suitcases while Nick struggled with the other four. I craned my neck, looking for my mom’s silver SUV. As she rounded the corner into the terminal, I spotted something furry perched in the front passenger seat: Dreamboat Annie, her two-year-old golden retriever.

I’d anticipated this. Annie has gone everywhere with my mom since my dad died, so before we took off, I warned my mom about the absurd amount of luggage we had with us. I gently suggested that it might be best to leave the dog at home, lest we run out of space in the car.

“I need to have Annie as driving in the dark is stressful,” my mom had replied. But when she saw our mountain of luggage, her jaw went slack.

“How could you have this much stuff?” she said. “You never have this much stuff.”

“My carry-on only policy does not apply to international moves,” I said, as I strained to lift a suitcase stuffed with bath towels and bed linens. And so commenced the clown show that was us trying to shove eight bags into the trunk while a hyperactive golden slobbered on the windows and attempted to launch herself out the open hatch. It was like a game of Tetris, only with more ambient dog hair and a higher risk of throwing our backs out. The whole arrivals deck was watching—a fellow passenger mumbled ooh, that’s not gonna work as though he were a football commentator watching his team throw a hail Mary, and dammit, we were going to prove him wrong. We stood the bags up. We put them on their sides. We folded the seats down and stacked them on top of each other. We got in the cab and put the smaller duffels on our laps. 

After what felt like half an hour, we were panting, and it was clear that no matter how we arranged things, there would only be room in the car for three passengers. And Annie, of course, made four. 

Admitting defeat, Nick and I called an Uber and told my mom we’d see her at the house. I’d left my jacket in the car, and as we waited for our ride I shivered in the damp chill of the marine layer, which I was no longer used to. Nick pulled me close and rubbed my arms to warm them.

“My mom chose a dog over us,” I muttered angrily into his chest. She hadn’t, really, but home leave was supposed to prove that we could stay away as long as we wanted, return when we felt like it, and pick up where we left off. It was supposed to show that home would hold space for us. As it happened, there wasn’t even space in my mother’s car. 

---

By the time I found myself grumpy and cold on that curb in San Francisco, we had already been in the States for a very long month. D.C. was the first stop on our five-city, bicoastal tour. I fell ill immediately upon arrival there, and I took to my bed like a proper Southern lady in a William Faulkner novel. When I emerged—four days and two seasons of Married At First Sight later—all I wanted was some hot soup, so Nick and I bundled up and walked to a ramen shop, one of our old haunts.

“Table for two, please,” I said to the hostess as we entered, ushering a gust of cold in with us.

“That’ll be a thirty-five minute wait,” she replied without looking up. “What’s a good phone number for you?”

Reader, I was apoplectic. Thirty-five minutes?? Never, in all my time in Cairo, had I waited for a table for even five minutes. Cairo restaurants—the ones worth going to, at least—are all strangely gargantuan. I’m talking room for 200 people, and rarely are more than two tables occupied. I had gotten used to showing up whenever I felt like it and being seated right away. Thirty-five minutes was a scandal! An outrage! 

I stormed back out into the night. “This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” I whined to Nick, without a trace of irony. “I hate it here.”

“Want to eat somewhere else?” Nick asked.

No, I said, I just wanted ramen and what was so freaking difficult about that? There was a time when a thirty-five-minute wait for ramen wouldn’t have phased me, but in Cairo I’d grown older, less passive, more cantankerous. I could tolerate nonsense abroad because at least it made for a funny story. But from my own countrymen? It could not be borne.  

We headed to a bar around the corner to wait for our table, and I continued my screed with beer in hand. Why did every D.C. restaurant require dinner reservations, yet they only ever had a spot at 4:00pm three weeks from now? Why did we Americans have to plan everything so far in advance? No wonder this city felt so hectic, so time-poor—we were all busy waiting thirty-five minutes to be seated for dinner. Whatever happened to leisure time, to spontaneity, to hot soup whenever we damn well please?

I kept my rant up between slurps of chewy noodles from my shoyu broth, and I don’t think I stopped for the rest of our time in D.C. My days there passed in a blur: I woke up, commuted to work, came home, ate, went to bed, and my scant free time was swallowed up by wait times at restaurants. In Cairo, I had spent quiet mornings sipping coffee and letting words flow freely onto blank pages. Stateside, I had no space to think, let alone to write; the less I wrote, the more worn-down I became, and my diatribe morphed into how I simply couldn’t hack it in the U.S. anymore. I didn’t miss this place, I said. It was only reinforcing my desire to move abroad forever, maybe to Greece or Italy, to a place with a window where I could sit and read, where we could have latchkey kids who would have time to dream. 

---

As you read this, I am still on home leave, in that extended twilight between one life and another. It’s a lonely place to occupy. I’m never sure what to say when I’m asked for my address, because strictly speaking I don’t live anywhere. At parties, friends with eager eyes ask what it’s like in Egypt, and I answer, lamely, “um, chaotic, I guess?” because I can’t figure out how to make myself understood—to reduce my most formative years to a clever quip. They ask, aren’t you just so happy to be home and I say yes, so happy because what else can I do? 

The truth is I miss my dog, my Dutch ovens, my tangled mess of knitting supplies. After months of invading the spaces of others—of tiptoeing around in the early mornings and asking permission to do my laundry—I’ve come to believe that home isn’t where your heart is, it’s where your stuff is. Where you can unpack your bags and live as you see fit. My home isn’t a question of the passport I hold. It’s a matter of where I can grow houseplants and cook big meals without apologizing to anyone for the mess in the kitchen. It’s where I have time and space to be exactly who I am. 

I don’t know that Jordan will be that place, but I have to hope. Each day, as I pick rumpled clothes out of my musty suitcases, I say a silent prayer that I find home there. I pray for simple things: a neighborhood café with decent espresso, calm streets where I can run, a sunny corner for my writing desk.

For the moment, I’ll hug my mom close and try to relish the frigid bay fog seeping into my bones. I’ll have to go searching for home again soon enough—I promise to let you know when I’ve found it.