Every so often, a weather front will blow in and there will be a whiff of ocean in the air. A salty breeze, subtle, probably unnoticeable to most people, but my senses are primed to recognize it.

And when I do, I let myself pretend for a minute that I am home.

I’ve been asked on occasion, as someone who’s lived a good six hours inland from the coast of Massachusetts for, oh, around 25 years now — why do I still cling to being from there so much? It’s been decades. I don’t even have close family or friends who live there now. They’re all either dead or moved away. I was eleven years old when I left, for goodness’ sake. It hasn’t been my home in ages. Shouldn’t I be “over it” by now?

It’s difficult for me to answer, because it’s a question that forces me to take a very critical look at something that I rooted irretrievably to my core sense of self. That makes it sound like a conscious choice and effort on my part, even at a very young age; to my recollection, in some ways I think it was. I deliberately leaned in, and leaned in hard, to being a New Englander. I wrapped that concept around myself like a security blanket turned superhero cape, to protect my soul from being lost and overrun. I had lost my fight against leaving my home, my grandparents, everything I knew. It was my way to not only cling to all of that, but also to resist this drastic life change that I hated, in the last method left to me. My entire life as I knew it, and indeed most of my possessions, were taken from me, gone, lost. The only thing left for me to do was to hold onto myself, my understanding of who I was, and desperately try to hold onto my memories of the only place that I ever truly felt happy and safe and loved and at peace.

That thought crystallized into my forevermore being from Boston, loud and proud, a girl whose happy place was and would always be Cape Cod. Sometimes I was very loud about it — I refused to care about how I came across at the time, in middle and high school, because that was part of the facade too, but, in hindsight, there were times when I was obnoxious about it. I became a diehard Red Sox fan once I left Massachusetts, and got into countless arguments with the Yankees fans I was surrounded by now. When it came time to apply to colleges, I exclusively applied to schools in Boston. I was determined to return. I almost went to Northeastern University, but we simply couldn’t swing the tuition, a bitter pill to swallow. In the end, I put a last-minute application in to the University at Albany, and got in with a scholarship. It was as close to Massachusetts as I could get, about a halfway point between where I’d been stuck and where I wish I was.

At its surface, the simple fact that we moved away because my parents split up shouldn’t seem like cause for such drastic identity politics. But I think that when you’re traumatically ripped from your home, after multiple other traumatic events that rocked your worldview, and you’re being raised by a toxic narcissist who taught you that your wants, needs, and identity are all secondary to everyone else’s, well…you’re facing loss of everything you’ve ever known, and an existential crisis is what logically follows for an eleven-year-old too painfully self-aware of her circumstances for her own good. Now at 36, well, I am an existential bitch, people!

It has been about 25 years since I was forced to leave Massachusetts in 2000. We had visits every couple of months when I was a teenager, then on rare occasions after my grandmother and then grandfather passed away in 2006 and 2008 respectively. My husband proposed to me during a trip to the Cape that I brought him on in summer of 2016, to show him my roots. We returned for a family vacation with our daughter in summer of 2021 (or was it 2022?). It has been 25 years…and I never stop wishing I was there. I carry it around with me, almost like a sympathetic string that gets softly strummed with each beat of my heart.

And on occasions when that sea-salty breeze crosses my path, the soft strum becomes more of a twang. I still live six hours away from home, so, I’ll take all the twangs that I can get, and enjoy the wistful smile they put on my face. I can’t afford to travel much, but, I always look forward to opportunities when I can go home again.