Home (Is Wherever I'm with You)

I'm curled up under a pile of fluffy comforters in heavy winter pajamas despite the warmth outdoors (I'm a cold sleeper.) My belly is full of homemade pie and hot tea and I'm being lulled to sleep by the sound of my clothing being tumbled in the dryer.

I've just finished biking 150 miles over the course of two days. When the logistics of taking the bus back to the North Country proved too daunting (soaking clothes, covered in sand, dead cellphone and no ability to call a ride when I got there) I decided "screw it, I'm staying here." Andy and Jacob offer to put me up for the evening and bring me home the next day. It isn't until I'm drifting off to sleep that I realize I didn't wash the clothes. I didn't make dinner or the pie or the tea. I didn't make the bed and I'm not even wearing my own pajamas (see the aforementioned soaked clothing.)

The last thing I say before falling asleep is Goddamn it. They did it again.

***

48 hours earlier I was standing in Jacob and Andy's kitchen when I got the Phone Call. 

If you haven't already gotten one, let me tell you, if you're over the age of 22 you've spent some time thinking about it. How the Phone Call will change your life in a completely horrible way that you can't even begin to anticipate. How the Phone Call will trigger all of your OCD symptoms and undo the work you've done over the past nine months to become a healthy, functioning human being. How after the Phone Call you'd like to drop to the ground and scream and cry, but you can't, because you're in a room full of your friends figuring out logistics for the 150 mile bike ride you're about to do. 

This is the second Phone Call I've had in the past six months, and thankfully, I don't drop to the ground and scream or burst into sobs. I excuse myself to the bathroom, run the water for a bit and hope they attribute it to the OCD and handwashing, and cry. When I come out, we finish planning logistics, I merely shake my head at Jacob's murmured question, and leave to go bike 150 miles. 

***

When I'm upset, I mean, truly and deeply upset, I throw myself into some Big Project. I've got over a bad relationship in graduate school by acing my comprehensive exams, a feat that required no fewer than thirty hours a week in my study carrel at the library. When I didn't get into a Ph.D. program, I learned academic French and wrote my thesis. Two years prior, I got over a(nother) disastrous relationship by training for a half marathon.

I like Big Projects. 

Thankfully, the weekend after the Phone Call is the MS 150 bike ride. A ride I've been training for over the course of about six months. A ride I've been looking forward to for almost as long. A ride I'm doing with Andy, to whom I've slowly spilled my guts over the course of the 2.5 hour ride to the North Country, someone I have come to love and trust implicitly.

It seems like a good Big Project to be undertaking at this moment. 

 Endurance events are funny things. If you're a headcase like me you run through stages while participating in them. From the initial thrill of ohmygodI'mdoingthis to the HolyShitsnackslookathowfarwe'vegone to the seemingly inevitable hitting the wall whatthefuckamIdoing? to the grim determination to finish Don'tyougetonthatSAGwagonKellyMarieProsen to the final, elated feeling at the conclusion OhmyGodIdidthat! 

Endurance events are funny things. They're even odder when you're doing them alongside another person, because I can almost guarantee that when you finish the event, you'll be closer than you anticipated. As a result, it's good to pick someone with the same basic fitness level as you, who can help pull you through the rough spots and cheer you up and keep you motivated. 

I literally could not have picked better when I asked Andy to do this with me. Sunday was, well, difficult. It was 55 degrees and raining. There was a headwind the whole day. And sometimes, even with a physical activity you love doing. I don't know. The joy just goes out of it and you're stuck either a) quitting and hating yourself forever or b) grimly determined to finish. I'm sure everyone reading will be shocked, shocked! to find out that I usually belong to the latter camp. 

I honestly don't now how, but Andy cajoled and prodded and teased me through those last seventy-five miles. And that day--those two days--were one of the best expressions of grace I've ever experienced. For two days, I didn't think about the Phone Call. I didn't care about the huge, complicated, conflicting emotions I've been having over two different, huge, complicated things that are happening in my personal life right now. I just got on my bike next to this person I love and did this Big Project.

***

If you could see my Spotify playlist you'd see that I've listened to the song Home by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros about three hundred times in the past month. The first 290 times I listened to it, I was trying to get my head around the chorus of the song Home is wherever I'm with you. I couldn't imagine ever being so close to someone that home wasn't Minneapolis/Saint Paul or Collegeville or Milwaukee, but could be wherever I was with them (and yes, I do constantly over analyze the lyrics to pop songs.) 

Listens 290-300+ came after Sunday. When Andy and I finished our ride on Sunday, I was supposed to take the bus back to the North Country. Soaked through to the skin, blistered, chafed by bike shorts, hungry, dirty, and physically and mentally exhausted, I started to think about the Phone Call. 

And I could not get on that fucking bus. Even if the volunteers had been more helpful in communicating the details (their disorganization and the fact that I literally did not have a stitch of  dry clothing were reasons I seized on to take a bus the following day) I could not have gotten on that bus for anything short of my mother magically being at the other end. And whatever my friends saw in my face or heard in my voice, they opened up their homes to me. They let me leave sand all over their bathrooms (biking 75 miles in the rain ensures that you'll have sand everywhere--and I mean everywhere), loaned me pajamas, made me dinner, did my laundry, gave me wine, sat next to me on the couch, made me laugh, gave me pie and tea and then sent me to bed under a giant pile of fluffy comforters. The next day, Jacob drove me home. These people cared for me in ways I could have never articulated but needed absolutely.

I'm not the kind of person who will ever be completely easy having one person take care of me. For as much as I want that kind of relationship, I don't know if I'll ever be able to be entirely at home in one. However, as part of a group of people, who share the endurance events and adult Phone Calls and Big Projects with one another?

Home is wherever I'm with ya'll.