I’m traveling again. Back on planes, pilfering free internet from sidewalk coffee shops, and cutting the top off my travel face moisturizer to eek out the last of the goodness. After eighteen nights in my own bed it’s time to leave and check out the mattresses of the eastern seaboard. It’s time to put on my game face, the one that gets me through security with nail clippers and belay knifes and does not flinch when Katherine, the gate attendant who cannot pronounce Baltimore, tells us it will be yet another forty minutes before our plane arrives.
    I live in a bubble. Boulder, Colorado, where everything is so perfect it’s imperfect. Most people agree with me on major political points. Everyone recycles. Volkswagen van drivers recognize other Volkswagen van drivers with a two-fingered wave. I had not left the bubble for the past three weeks and when I did last Friday I realized what I had been missing. Normal people. The pride in that normalcy.
    I’m flying over the flooded Mississippi looking at lakes that used to be towns. I’m watching a graphic episode of Sex and the City on my computer while the woman next to me reads the bible with an accompanying pamphlet, complete with exercises, entitled “Letting the scripture explain your life.” The kid on my other side has a head that is pulsating in time to the beat of the music seeping out of his oversized headphones. I don’t get this at home.
    On my next flight I elbow-joust with an elderly gentleman for an armrest until I finally turn to him, make eye contact, and offer to rotate the perch on a twenty-minute basis. He agrees.
    I have not spent more than twenty-five days in a row in my own bed since I left the bed I shared with my ex-husband three years ago. Maybe it’s time to admit that I am on the go. Maybe its time to admit that this life—this one of random seatmates and conversations and observations of the other, is what I am really after. Because if I look at my calendar for the next twelve months I cannot find a twenty-five day stretch anywhere. Maybe it’s time to settle in, get on a plane, and pull out my favorite seatback glossy. I did that today and flipped right to The Million-Germ Eliminating Travel Toothbrush Sanitizer. I earmarked it. Then I wrote this note. And then I went back and un-creased the page. What if there are two million germs? I want the toothbrush that will take care of that. I might need it where I am going.

I’m home in Boulder for the next five days, three days longer than I have been in town for three months. I’ve been looking forward to this week for a long time, but when I drove into town last night I felt empty instead of relived. I’ve become addicted to the road. The travel creates a sense importance. I need to be places, need to talk to people. Now I am just at home doing laundry.
    I wonder if I could do anything, if I just started doing it. And this is not about the skill, but more the tolerance. What can we get used to?
    A few weeks ago in Houston I was careening down the highway at 80mph and getting passed on each side of the 7-lane highway at 12:30 pm on my way to a hotel. The dome light in my rental car was out, and I used the slight glow from my dying phone to illuminate my directions. In the middle of it, instead of saying I was over it, I was trying to figure out if I could do it. But it really does not matter what you can do. It matters what you want to do. Or it does if you have the luxury of having the time and the resources to make changes from one to the other.
    I’m traveling around the country, at the tail end of the initial tour push. Along the way I am seeing everyone from my past, and just now figured out that beyond reconnecting with old friends, I am also trying on alternate versions of myself. There is the urban planner with his pediatric neurologist wife, the entrepreneur, the stay at home dad, the public defender. We all started from the same point. I know I’m lucky to do this. I’m lucky to do a lot of this. But it’s also incredibly tweaky to your head. Because after trying on every pair of jeans nothing feels good anymore and all you want is to just get out of the dressing room.
    And so I come home. And I did it even before Boulder. On Friday, my friend Sarah picked me up in her dying Previa Van at the end of the Commuter Rail outside of Boston. I sat on the floor in the back and realized I was breathing differently for the first time in weeks. I like to make things difficult for myself, always have. At one point I was supposed to go to the University of Chicago for college and the reasons I decided that this was the right choice were the following: everyone said it was the socially hardest place to go to school in the US, that it was impossible to have a life there, and that the academics were insane. Great, I thought, I am in. I will go and prove that I can do that.
    But proving that I can make it from the financial district to Lowell with 130 lbs of luggage is really not proving anything. I didn’t do this in my twenties, back then I was building a strawbale house on 4.5 acres bordering national forest land. When I left that house and that life, I thought I might have missed out on something else, that I might have wanted to be in central Boston or Miami, or that I should have been. But what I’ve come to figure out is that I might be in the right place after all. I get off the plane in Denver and think yes, this is home. But it only became home once I started going away.
    Choices are intoxicating. For all of us. Almost everyone I have visited with says the same thing. It’s like we try to limit them and augment them at the same time. I’d like to think that at some point we just chill the hell out and live them. Or that I will.

I had a deal with myself when I went to pick up my book at the airport. If something went wrong, if it looked awful, if I could not face it, I was going to Sri Lanka. Mexico would have been more logical—easier, closer, tacos. But Sri Lanka was the deal. That was almost a week ago. Last night, instead of exploring Jaffna, I was at the Boulder Bookstore.

Boulder is everything it is reputed to be. Everyone is beautiful, fit, eats organic food and wears clothes that are flexible enough to strike a warrior pose in on demand. It’s also my home. Standing up in front of a crowd of 70 people last night made it my home. I moved here over two years ago, driving down the windy canyon from Estes Park on US 36 more times than was reasonable with plants uprooting themselves and artwork crumbling in the backs of pickups, vans, sedans and coups.

When I was a kid I thought being an adult was a trajectory. You got on a path at some point and you rode it—you had your friends, your job, your family—your life. Adulthood is nothing of the sort. But there are moments when it feels like it is all coming together. Strangers and friends and family all mixed in wooden and plastic chairs on the second floor between fiction and poetry last night. And just like that, I felt at home again for the first time in years.