I went back to my hometown and things were almost exactly the same, but the part that was exactly the same was the endless miles of trees with no leaves from November to March on Interstate 78
Well that title spiraled out of control
There is a running joke between my partner and I that I know directions much better in the small town in New Jersey that I grew up in—but haven’t set foot in for nearly six years—than the city where we both lived in full time for essentially the last decade.
Okay, it actually isn’t really a running joke. It is more of a sense of frustration at my inability to think a few steps ahead and internalize directions in a city that I live in. For many years, we shared one car between the two of us, with my wife doing the majority of driving. This meant I did not have to memorize directions, so I lazily chose not to.
If you ask me to drive from the house I have lived at every day for the past two-and-a-half years to a store I go regularly, I guarantee you I will have to pull up my phone and get directions that way. Now, if you drop me in northern New Jersey and tell me to drive to a store, or more likely a path at the end of a street somewhere with a weird nickname that only like four other humans on earth will understand, I can do it without any help whatsoever. Instantaneously.
It is a microcosm of my marriage in a sense. The last 10 or so years I’ve never truly lived with an eye on the future. I think part of this is rooted in the idea that I was living a life that I knew wasn’t truly mine, and I delayed any sense of growing up and planning ahead a decade down the line because I wasn’t sure if I was going to get through this one. The closest I came to ensuring that was a reality was my sophomore year of college, and, honest to God, having to go to rowing practice every day saved my life.
All that is starting to change now that I’ve come out. My partner and I have been working on our relationship in earnest the past year and have started to see some major breakthroughs as partners. Having clarity for the first time in my life about a life worth living is terrifying, but exciting. The road ahead seems a lot longer than it did at the beginning of the year, no matter how many low points I had to endure to see over that horizon.
At first, I truly did not want to go to my ten-year high school reunion.
I have a habit of leaning into the absurdities of my life and “committing to the bit,” so to speak, because for most of my life I acted as if my life consisted as sketch show with a never ending series of bits. Life was an experience to be had, and when one memory would end then it was time to form a new one.
Part of this was reinforced by the friends I kept, and luckily to this day, still keep. We love to trade stories and memories. Conversations can spiral out of control for hours just reminiscing for better or worse.
Three of my close friends from high school have ended up where I live currently, which is a modern day miracle. The town I grew up in—a bland boring Northern New Jersey suburb of 10,000 people with a high school class of 140—was nothing to write home about, but had an inescapable pull that felt as if you were destined to never get that far away. When my parents moved out the town when I was in college about an hour south, it caused a scandal among my friends. Not because we wouldn’t see each other during summer breaks, but because nobody leaves where I grew up.
A consequence of my parents skipping town was visiting much less and losing track of the hangers-on of any suburban friend group. In this case it represented the entirety of my senior class because of how small our school was. I wasn’t regularly coming home to go to the townie bars they are frequented. Rather, I was eloping on a whim and moving down to Brazil. I lived a full, rich life chasing that idea of what my life was supposed to be: moments I could share whenever I saw someone close and elicit raucous laughter in the process of catching up.
That means getting drunk this March and pestering the gracious organizers of our ten-year reunion online to include Thanksgiving weekend as an option, felt in line with how I’ve always acted and operated. It was no different to me than the time when someone got suspended from high school my sophomore year for attempting the “gallon challenge” and vomiting at lunch. He then had the entire school purchase t-shirts that said “drinking milk is not a crime” and wearing them three days later in a mass protest against our administration, while students would interrupt class and pull out hidden gallons of milk and chug them. Like I said, we were absurd at times.
We are not 18-year-old adolescents anymore on the verge of adulthood and starting new chapters in our lives. We are all 28-year-olds with jobs and lives scattered to the wind. Many of us have families. Not everyone appreciated the brash outburst of a random person trying to upend a nice get together, but as I jokingly said to friends who were skeptical about attending: the influence campaign work.
Everything was set for the Saturday after Thanksgiving at a local restaurant. The reunion was on, and I, for one, couldn’t wait to be there.
The thing about small towns is they change, but they don’t change much.
That’s what I always told myself to justify how I was able to so easily navigate around New Jersey, while making almost no effort to re-learn how to get around Atlanta after returning from Brazil.
I easily played it off as having adjusted to a new city so quickly that Atlanta was relatively foreign when I returned. The fact that the city has changed so much since I first got here in 2009 always helped my cause, or so I would explain, despite not being able to get to our favorite hangouts while driving.
Maybe I never internalized where I was in Atlanta because at times I wasn’t sure I wanted to live there long-term. There was a big part of me that wishes I had stayed in Brazil after my job covering the 2016 Olympic preparations ended, and I was a finalist for a foreign correspondent job in Thailand shortly after. I pursued jobs in Tokyo relentlessly, as well as any newspaper job that became available. Many of these weren’t in the Southeast, but many of them were. Really though, I was just biding time before addressing that I had to become myself, my actual self, one day.
I like to think that you never truly leave New Jersey, but no matter what happens where you live New Jersey does change. Even the small town I grew up in, and am purposely not naming in this newsletter, looked slightly different when I came back. There were new houses, new strip malls, and for the first time in the area’s nearly 300-year history a bar and a brewery. I grew up in a dry town. I did not get to hang out at the brewery with my friends visiting family, but I have been told it exists.
Even the register configuration at the pizza parlor we frequented as teenagers was slightly off from where it was the last time I was there six years ago.
It is disorienting when something you knew so innately is different from what it once was. I think that’s why relationships fall apart. What you knew is endearing, but what you knew is never going to stay the same way forever. People and places change, it is the natural order of life. Accepting that and growing with it is how you stay ahead of that disorienting feeling, but there are always going to be moments that catapult it back to reality in the forefront.
Seriously, my town now has a bar and I never got to go to it because it closes at 10pm and our reunion ended at 11pm. I can’t get over it.
Right before the reunion ended one of the girls who organized it that I didn’t really get along with in high school whispered in my ear “this is all your fault” as we posed for a cheery group photo. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her during the event, and learned right before this that she now works for the FBI.
Even typing this all out it does not feel real. It feels like a bit. Going to the reunion started as a bit, where I peer-pressured a large group of friends (around 7-8) to come after they expressed no desire to show up. We weren’t in the popular crowd in high school, but all found each other to get through it. Once the event was over, everyone came to the consensus that this was actually a really fun night full of people looking to catch up on the best of terms despite not having seen each other in some cases for 10 years.
After being privately excoriated for selfishly driving the direction of this reunion I decided, rather drunkenly, that I was not going to let this person have the last laugh in terms of attention and I was going to come out to my class at the bar we were all going to after it ended.
Everyone was incredibly supportive, and I am actually incredibly grateful that I did it. I want to keep in touch with many of them, and they deserve to know me as my authentic self. What started as a bit molded into a truly heartwarming moment that ended with tequila shots at 1am at a suburban townie bar that I hadn’t been to since I was 22. I even woke up with one or two text messages reinforcing that support overnight. It was one of the best moments I could have asked for. Sometimes, committing to the bit is the only way to get through a potentially awkward situation, and leads to the best stories you will cherish for a lifetime.
Before I went to my reunion I visited a party my father was throwing and dropped off a letter telling him I was transitioning. It went incredibly smooth, but I could not stop laughing at the fact my father a self professed New Yorker for life now lives in the suburban town right next to where I grew up. His house is now a 10 minute drive from the one I grew up in without him there. For a while he lived with his second wife in Pennsylvania, worked in New York City, and would park his car in Trenton so he could drive it up to see me on weekends when we would have lunch. I never really told him how much it meant that he would go through this great effort to come see me, after an abusive situation estranged us for five years when I was growing up. It was hard to open up completely with my father when his wife was doing some pretty heinous shit behind the scenes, though I do not blame him for any of it. I was just grateful to be able to see him again, even if that meant just a lunch at a Burger King or an occasional foray into New York City.
In one of those larger than life moments, I actually credit 9/11 with bringing us back together. I hadn’t seen my father in three years at that point and he survived the attacks despite working in Tower 1. His second wife allowed our calls to become much more regular after that event, and we began talking weekly.
My father is rather conservative, but in the “never Trump” vein. He proudly voted for Hilary Clinton, as I furiously sold him on the idea of the status quo being maintained through the Democratic candidate, something he believed in despite his outlook.
He’s never expressed a conservative social view, but certainly has in his economic view and in terms of how the governing project should be run. I was incredibly worried dropping off a letter to him coming out because while we talk regularly I truly didn’t know how he would react.
The next day after I slept off a hangover until around 4pm he called me and his first question was asking if he could still send emails to my Gmail account. This is significant because that Gmail account I use has my deadname in it. I use it professionally and because it doesn’t bother me that much, but the fact that this was his first concern was one of the sweetest things to ever been asked of me.
Embarrassingly I ended the night before blackout drunk before coming home to a friends house. After spending a day literally driving through but never quite stepping in my hometown, I spent the night there and I can’t even remember it.
I woke up alarmingly on the second floor of his house, with no idea where I was before making my way to the garage to get some water so I could compose myself and drive home.
The drive from my hometown to my parents house isn’t long, but its noticeably mostly on interstate highways. All throughout the Northeast these highways are notorious for being routed through wooded areas. It gives the impression that you can’t really see too far ahead or behind, and you just need to focus on driving in the moment. You get where you need to go, but your concept of time is lost with you as the miles you have driven get higher and higher.
In the winter the trees in New Jersey lose their leaves by mid-November, so driving around the holidays you notice that there are houses perched really close to the interstate. You’re not longer in the woods driving as fast as you can getting where you need to be in the fastest route, you are driving through heavily populated areas at terrifyingly fast speeds commuting like everyone else. The joke for locals in New Jersey is not to ask what town someone is from, but what exit on what highway they get off on to get home. Avoiding exit 44 on Interstate 78 had its perks, but I was forced to leave through it when going home the day after the reunion for what could be the last time ever.
Soon after I got on to the highway I was able to notice through the crushing hangover that the route back south in this case was largely downhill. You usually cannot see more than half a mile in front of you when driving on the Interstate, but the combination of being on such high ground and having the trees having no leaves meant that I could see miles ahead to where I was going. For the first time ever, the road was clear.