the grown-up tck effect

I went to the airport for the first time in several months recently. I’ve flown maybe three times round trip since 2020, maybe a dozen times all told in the last 5 years. My Skymiles account has lost all of its medallion status, and I’m pretty sure I have more points in the Chick-Fil-A app at this point. But I need to fly, so I stick my concealer and travel toothpaste in a quart-sized bag and head out.

This time, I leave the house before dawn and the roads are quiet. The fog is heavy and smells of the nearby ocean, salty and warm coming through the air filter of my car. The street lights glow a ghostly orange and the sky is slowly turning a grey-green-yellow. The sun starts to rise and I turn up the gentle sad-girl-with-guitar music that feels right for the moment.

The moon, perfectly white and speckled grey against the now purple-blue sky, looks like a sticker I could peel off, leaving just the thin red-orange streak of cloud above it. 

I stop at a Dunkin and in my early-morning-drive stupor, I accidentally order my coffee black. I still drink the whole cup, the bitterness waking me up and slowing me down. My TSA Precheck didn’t show up, so I had to take off my shoes for the first time in years. A couple shares their pod of chairs in the atrium with me and we toast our Wendy’s Diet Cokes at 9am.

Everything else about the trip is uneventful and a blur like most travel is, except for a quip from the pilot when he told us that the weather at our destination was, “17 centigrade, or 63 degrees Fahrenheit for normal people,” which made me laugh out loud in my middle seat in the second-to-last row. 

Maybe it’s nostalgia, me and my overstuffed backpack against the world, but I love airports. For a while, it was a go-to deflection joke of mine to say they’re where I feel most at home. A small part of that may be true, the transit and the anonymity and bustle are magic still.

Flights were second nature by the time I hit double-digits, and solo ventures not long after. I was always proud of how deftly I could navigate an airport; the picture of confidence at 13, armed with a heavily-stamped passport, cover soft from use.

I haven’t used my passport in nearly four years. This time, it’s my horizontal drivers’ license that I’d handed to a bartender the night before.

The hum of an airport lives as easily in my head as a mid-2000s worship song; the percussion of a roll aboard scraping on and off a moving walkway one of the most vivid sensory memories I have. I can remind you which terminal Starbucks is in at a handful of airports and rank major European and American hubs by nicest bathroom.

I realized, though, on this most recent trip, that I don’t miss the airport the way I used to, as a kid and even in college. It’s familiar, sure, and as comfortable as an airport can be, but most of the restlessness is fading. I no longer feel like I’m missing something during the stretches of time I’m somewhere. Airports are home, but also places are home, a handful of scattered cities. I think I will always be a little bit rootless – not the grass is always greener so much as there is just so much grass. I want to find my grass now.

There was a period of my life in which my favorite fun fact about myself was that I had spent over half my life overseas. I would happily rattle off everywhere I’d lived and been. I volunteered the information with glee and a raging superiority complex.

That fact – the half-my-life one – stopped being true years ago. I’ve gotten better at telling stories, sorting when I can leave out the preface that it takes place in Africa, or whether the boarding school detail is relevant. I balk less at the dreaded “where are you from,” and can pretty quickly pick a place, supply a couple details but not make it sound too exciting, and move on.

Part of me, sometimes, feels like a little bit of a superhero. The smugness I feel when someone is talking about their week-long safari must be how Clark Kent would feel when folks bring Superman up to him, right? If only you knew.

But I also don’t really care. Their experience of a place is so vastly different from mine. 

The details – the immediate, particular ones – the markets in the parking lots of grocery stores where you could buy intricate wood- and beadwork, the way Friday nights in Jerusalem were soundtracked by calls to prayer and sounds from three faiths floating on the breeze, the weekend trips to Lake Como and Madrid with a bunch of fellow awkward teenagers, the way red clay smells after it rains – have become so ingrained in who I am, it’s hard to remember to explain them.

It’s difficult to describe, for those unfamiliar with it, the feeling of untetheredness that comes with having grown up this way. It’s in turn terrifying and consuming – an abyss of no one understands me and I will never truly belong – and deeply freeing: there is always a new place and new people. Moving is mildly lower-case-t traumatic, but I’ve done it a dozen times so I know I can. I’m well-practiced at (or numb to) goodbyes, and I assume that everything will end but that’s not a bad thing. I don’t really know where I’m from, but I don’t feel like I have to be from anywhere. I am both literally always aware of all of this, but also never really think about it. 

For better or worse, that instinct has followed me into my career. I freelance, taking a contract for a show or two or four at a time, moving into company-provided housing with my two suitcases in a new city every few months, telling new stories with new people. 

My time isn’t divided into countries anymore, and the quick math of this country = this school year = these calendar years. It’s split instead by a theatre season, by show slots, by what I was working on at the time. 

It’s that same sense of transience, that same sense of alchemy that marks a contract that resounds through years of moves. Theatre is fundamentally ephemeral. Every single show only happens once; every performance is a little bit different. These people are only together here right now, in much the same way that anywhere I’ve ever called home is home because of the people. 

It’s the summer camp effect – spending so much concentrated time together and then it just evaporating, budding almost-friendships fading into the occasional Instagram swipe-up. Occasionally, there’s one with instant chemistry and the deep, almost jealous resolve to keep them around. They become tipsy texters and late-night-drive phone callers and did-you-see-that-person-is-dating-someone-new kinds of friends, the hey can I complain for a sec and yeah just FaceTime me, and then later: hold on let me plug my phone in people, who trade equally in dumb TikToks and advice and songs I might like. They become people you visit, pins in a mental map, factors in your schedule.

It’s the same thing as my middle school friends I haven’t spoken to in a decade but I know if I found myself stranded in their city, a Facebook message would be answered with a meal and somewhere to sleep. If they were anywhere near me, I’d offer the same.

Once, in New York City, I crashed on the couch of a dear friend from high school who I hadn’t seen in years, politely turning down her offer of her bed. She had to work the next day, but left me her laptop so that I could take care of some of my business – complete with her Apple ID log in should there be an issue. I grabbed her spare key and got a bagel for breakfast and browsed a bookstore, but mostly sat in her basement on her laptop while she wasn’t even home. We split a box of mac and cheese for dinner, and I left before she was up the next morning. 

These are the kind of friendships that happen, the weird kind borne of the shared everywhere-and-nowhereness that still defines my life somehow.

A friend of mine is on tour with a musical. She’s in a new city every week or so. After a long, chaotic day, she texted me a long string of messages ending with “and I still have to find breakfast tomorrow!” This is the kind of friend with whom my location sharing is turned on, the kind I’ve given the phone numbers of a couple close family members, because if I didn’t pick up her call, she’d be suspicious. So. I check her location and cross-reference it with maps, Yelp, and TripAdvisor and ten minutes later have locations, distances, and menu items to recommend. She laughs and thanks me, and I am reminded of my dad and grandfather doing the exact same thing for me whenever I go somewhere new. They always ask if I’ve tried that one place yet. My friend texted me a picture of her croissant the next day, and I called my dad.

Now, in new cities, I give my comp tickets to servers at restaurants and little old ladies who live in my apartment building and assemble a new friend group over and over again.

I still have a bad habit of calling everywhere home. A hotel room. America. A foreign country I’ve never been to, but my parents are there – my mom’s home, I said to a friend recently. They asked me to be more specific. They thought I meant the opposite of what I meant. Every company housing I’ve had, a room for two months, is home. 

I am always home, and I am never home. Such is the game I play.

I’m old enough now, far enough removed from the wanderlust phase, to separate a lot of it, to shake it off, to avoid it in casual conversation. But I’m not old enough to not still feel fifteen about it all sometimes – wondering if I peaked too soon, if that really is the most interesting thing that has or will ever happen to me, if it’s weird, if I’m the only person who has ever felt this way. 

The TCK literature I was taught growing up did not prepare me for my twenties. I still travel, but it’s not the same, I still can’t answer “where are you from,” which has lately become, “where are you based?” It is not assumed to be complicated, the way it was in grade school, where “America” sufficed more often than not. The real story is too long, too annoying to explain, capped by a well-rehearsed list of countries that I still stumble over. So I lie, or just shrug and say I moved around a lot. Maybe one day I’ll find somewhere I love enough to stay.

In the meantime, I still get excited every time I have to ride a train between terminals at the airport. I still feel a little bit fancy riding an escalator and drinking from a water fountain. I will probably always wonder if I’m doing this right and if I’m missing something, but I hope I’ll never not love being a little bit at home everywhere.