If choosing a place to live is as important as choosing a mate, like some folks say, I guess it makes sense that walking away from the city I’ve called home for going on 20 years feels an awful lot like a break-up. Exhilaration, sadness, relief, trepidation … check, check, check, check.

Early on in my decision-making process, I thought a lot about exactly why it wasn’t working with me and B. I liked to trumpet B’s shortcomings: The weather, it sucks. The men, they are meatheads. The cultural offerings, they are limited. The T, where to fucking begin? Justifying the choice that in my heart was already made, I guess.

But, I mean, it would be disingenuous to pretend that there’s nothing good about B, nothing to recommend it to others, nothing I myself once appreciated enough to proudly call it home. It’s the same with relationships. Who’s the bigger fool? The colossally “flawed” one or the one who stays for 20 years?

No, no. Once upon a time, B was to me a beguiling city. Even now, there are moments when I catch her in just the right light and I am reminded of the city I chose as The One. Which leads me to the second stage of my decision-making process, wherein much time was spent thinking about whether or not B and I could be saved. Was I trying hard enough? Were my expectations too high? Had I failed B with my rose-colored glasses and castles in the sky?

I wanted to be the kind of person who can thrive anywhere, who placidly makes the most of every situation. In relationship terms, this is analogous to the person who has a marriage of convenience … material entanglements and little more, emotional investment kept to a minimum.

I wanted to be someone who could dial down the ache to be gotten, to be betrothed to their best friend. To my horror, I wanted—apparently—to be a character in a Tammy Wynette song … the stoic, long-suffering, lemonade-from-lemons heroine ideal.

It was a shakubuku realization. B and I didn’t fail each other. I failed myself.

I’m not Mother Theresa or some look-the-other-way politician’s wife. I want to be in love with where I live. Truly, madly, deeply. As Juno’s dad explains:

Look, in my opinion the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what-have-you, the right person is still going to think the sun shines out of your ass.

Sadly, I never believed the sun shined out B’s ass. I thought I could live with that, but I was wrong.

See, I’m all rosy idealism and head-in-the-cloudiness. I want to be the kind of person who’s okay with that. I want that to be my gift to the world.

People who read this post also read …

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Here I am, the day before a last-minute trip to California, for what could very well be the most important job interview of my young, okay, youngish life, and suddenly … SUDDENLY … I feel moved to write the post that I’ve been unable—for one reason or another—to write going on a month now. I’ve got résumés to print and tiny toiletry bottles to fill, outfits to try on and Harvard Business Review case studies to cram. Also, I have to practice my enthusiastic-but-not-insane face. Anyway, my pre-interview rituals are neither here nor there. The point is, my writer’s block has chosen the least opportune moment to unceremoniously lift.

Poof.

It makes perfect sense, really. Until now, the move has felt a little like the time I told my second-grade teacher that her colleague, the sixth-grade teacher (aka “my mom”) wasn’t my real mom, that I was adopted, and that I was going to London to visit my birth mother over the summer. You know, the move felt like just something you say, a story of an alternate life, one you try on but don’t buy. Tomorrow, though, all that changes. You might say tomorrow’s the last day of second grade … and my bags are packed for London.

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In an effort to get an actual blog post written, like, from beginning to end, I’ve turned to my handy dandy little mobile device (aka the iPhone 4 … *swoon*) and WordPress’s mobile app. If this proves to be expeditious, brief(ish) mobile posts could become a trend, but given my propensity for editing posts obsessively, that is by no means a certainty.

The thing is I’ve been slammed at work on this project that exists (for me) almost entirely on paper. The days of endless hours in front of a computer have been but a memory, and it was during those endless hours that much of my furtive blog writing and planning occurred. Not entirely unrelated, as well, is the fact that I’ve been working through a few personal things of late, and it’s my habit to withdraw from the world a bit a lot when that’s the case.

The end result of this computerless seclusion? A dissatisfaction with the work slice of my life pie that was heretofore unknown *and* the big decision to finally quit whining about Boston’s shortcomings and just move already.

So, yeah, big changes ahead. I’ll write in more detail about all that soon. In the meantime, start preparing yourself, ya know, mentally for the forthcoming video diary of my cross-country junket. I’ve already begun recording myself whilst driving for practice. It’s a very odd thing, making video monologues. Perhaps I’ll post some of my out-takes, so you can bask in the awkwardness of the process right along with me.

Also, I’d really like some help with road trip mixes for my many, many hours behind the wheel. Think of some great road trip songs and post them for me in the comments. Shit, if you wanted to make me an entire playlist, you could instantly become my most valued reader. I promise to share any and all resultant mixes. Heck, maybe I’ll even do something cool with a video travelogue/road trip mix mash-up. Who knows. I’m feeling pretty inspired by all the upheaval.

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