We hosted a small get-together tonight – my girlfriend, her niece, me, and a couple of friends. Dinner at a restaurant, then back to my building to keep hanging out a little longer. Good night. Normal Sunday night. The kind where I picked up the check and everyone paid me back anyway. Couldn’t make them take it back no matter how hard I tried, so I’ve decided that officially makes this a standing dinner invitation to everyone, going forward. Then I walked them out, said the goodbyes, got back in the elevator alone. Five minutes earlier that same elevator had people in it – chatter, laughing, someone probably still finishing a joke from dinner. Now it was just me and the hum of the motor, going up, and somewhere in that thirty seconds I started thinking about my girlfriend moving to Kansas, and about my mother’s saying, and about all of this in a way I hadn’t let myself sit with while everyone was still here.
That’s usually when it gets me. Not in the big, dramatic moments. In the quiet ones right after them. It’s part of why I ended up calling this piece what I did, before I even knew what I wanted to say in it. The title is borrowed, loosely, from that movie with Will Smith. It’s not really the same story as ours; his was about money and effort, and ours is about…quite literally, paperwork. But the movie and the title stuck with me anyway.
My mother told me something once that I didn’t understand until much later: the more you want to settle down, the more you have to move around.
At the time, it sounded like one of those things parents say that’s supposed to sound wise but doesn’t really mean anything. Like one of those “you’ll understand it when you get older” moments. Now I think about it almost every day. Most people hear “pursuit” and think of chasing something – choosing, striving, going after what you want. For us it’s mostly meant something closer to compliance: take the job that’s available, move to the state that’s available, follow whichever path is still open to you.
My girlfriend is moving to Kansas next month. Not because she wants to live in Kansas. Not because there’s anything in Kansas for her , no family, no friends, no history. She’s moving because a company in Kansas offered her a job and was willing to sponsor her visa, and a company in Chicago, where she actually lives, where I live, where her life is, was not.
That’s really the whole thing. Not “where do I want to be”, just “who will sponsor me.” And then you go there, wherever there is. We should be celebrating, and in some way we are – a sponsored offer is the thing every international student is quietly hoping for, the thing that makes the whole ordeal feel worth it. But the good news is also the reason she’s leaving. Her friends here, me, everything she’s built over the last few years – all of it stays behind while she starts over in a state she’s never lived in. It’s a strange thing, being happy for someone and losing them for the same reason, in the same sentence. If she were a U.S. resident, she could have stayed. She could have kept looking in Chicago, taken her time, weighed offers against her actual life instead of against a legal technicality. She could have said no to a job in a city she’s never been to.
To be perfectly clear: I don’t resent anyone who happened to be born with a U.S. passport, or who got their residency some other way – it’s not really about them. But I’d be lying if I said I never envy how simple their decisions get to be: where do I want to live, what job actually excites me. We don’t usually get to start there. That’s just the deal, and some days I notice it more than others.
That’s the paradox my mom was talking about, I believe. You want roots. You want to stop moving, stop starting over, stop being the temporary person in every room you’re in. But the only way to earn the right to stay still is to prove, over and over, for years, that you’re worthy, that you’re good enough, or at least, qualified to be a resident here. Stability is the reward at the end of a decade of instability, and there’s no way to skip ahead.
I think I understood that paradox on my own terms before I ever connected it to hers. For the past few years I’ve mostly kept to myself, and that was a choice, not just circumstance. Friendships take time to build, and I knew I wasn’t going to stay in one place long enough to make that worth it. I’ve never been good at goodbyes, so I found a different way around it: I just stopped letting myself get close enough to people for a goodbye to matter. It felt practical at the time. I’m less sure now that it was.
She’s the first person in a long time I didn’t manage myself around like that. Which might be part of why this particular goodbye doesn’t sit the way the others used to.
Before her, I didn’t really have much of a social life here – that part wasn’t really circumstance either, if I’m honest with myself. Somewhere along the way, dinners like tonight, her friends becoming people I just call my friends too, someone always around, hanging with her on movie nights, turned into a habit. Losing her is the real loss. But losing the habits too, quietly, alongside it – I don’t really know what to call that.
Someone tonight asked if I was sad about her leaving. I gave some short answer and let the conversation move on, because I didn’t want to say yes in front of her. This is going to be the first time she’s lived on her own, and I didn’t want my sadness to be one more thing she has to manage on top of everything else. So I saved it for the elevator, and now for this.
From the outside, this probably just reads like an ordinary long-distance story. Seriously, two people who love each other, one job offer, a few states apart? That happens to plenty of couples. Ours has one more tiny detail worth mentioning: neither of us was born here.
I don’t have a neat ending for this. We’re not breaking up. We’re doing the long distance thing, doing the visits, doing the math on when the next trip can happen. We tell each other it’s temporary, that it’s a means to an end, that the visa, eventually a green card and perhaps the citizenship, is worth it. And I think it probably is. That movie ends with a clean payoff – the guy gets the job, and the text on screen tells you it worked out. Ours doesn’t come with that guarantee. There’s just years of this, one visa renewal and one goodbye at a time, and you hope it adds up to something on the other side. I just wanted to write down, somewhere, what it actually feels like from the inside – that the pursuit of happiness, for us, looks less like chasing something we want and more like following the door that happened to open, and trying to find peace with that.
For a while now, seeing her has just meant a short trip, not a plan. In less than 48 hours, that stops being true. She’ll be ten hours away by car, in a city she didn’t choose, and the short trip becomes something I have to plan around flights. That, or a very long drive. I spent years avoiding this exact feeling by not letting anyone close enough to cause it. This time I didn’t avoid it. I don’t have a way to make that easier: I just wanted to write down what it felt like, tonight, in the thirty seconds between the noise and the silence. But perhaps, like Robert Frost said:
The only way out is through.