It's completely unexpected, but I've been feeling a lot of separation anxiety since leaving Seattle. Two years doesn't seem like a lot of time to get attached to a place, but I've really been missing it.
Part of it is the physical location, driving around the east side, enjoying the comfort and tranquility of our Snoqualmie neighborhood, walking around the Redmond campus, seeing Mt. Si, even stopping in the mall in Bellevue. Our adopted home town was a really wonderful place to live, and if I'm being objective, is just "better" than Northeast Ohio.
I'm also missing our friends out there, which of course is made infinitely worse by Facebook (except for Teresa, who never uses Facebook). This is hardly surprising either, since we went through some of the most intense events of our lives, especially having a child, with our friends around King County. When you still have that "thing" (Simon) with you, but not the infrastructure built around it, it's hard. It's especially hard knowing the Snoqualmie Mattoni's aren't a mile down the road.
There were points over the weekend where I actually started to think, "Fuck, what did we do?" A lot of that I'm sure has to do with the stress of moving and the chaos that is our house right now. Our home, and Cleveland in general, is not the same place that we left, so familiarity does not play a huge role in trying to settle back in.
The most positive thing that comes out of these feelings for me is a sense that home can be in any place that you make it. I've successfully done it, and we're doing it again. In fact, when we can reach our goals and make a run at being gators, I think the decision to do so will be fairly easy. The challenge isn't making yourself comfortable and happy where you live. I'm confident that we'll get to that point very quickly. The challenge is reconciling the multiple lives you establish in different geographies. It kinda sucks that you can't live all of them simultaneously.
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