Back to Normal: Goodbye Friends

We were far apart & the pandemic brought us back together

All my friends are fairly well scattered across the USA and the world — from my college cohort alone, my closest friends are in Seattle, Washington DC, New York City, Upstate New York, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Boston, Dallas, and Cleveland.

My family isn’t any better — we grew up in Texas, my sister now lives in Miami, my dad & stepmom in North Carolina, and my mom & stepdad largely live on their boat, making them a moving target.

So when I started traveling full-time in June 2014, a major benefit was being able to visit my people in different places and actually have in-person time together.

As I kept traveling, the years adding up, everyone would ask me: when are you going to move somewhere? Besides the fact that I enjoyed my nomadic existence, I simply didn’t have a single place I should obviously move to.

There was no central hub for my personal & professional life, except perhaps NYC, and I didn’t want to move back there until I was ready & able to commit to a few years (and not on the ludicrously low budget I’d scraped by on before).

Then the pandemic happened.

On March 2, 2020, I flew back to the USA from abroad, having fled from Thailand to Berlin and then to Doha before finally deciding (in spite of government reassurances that this coronavirus was nothing) that I better get back to the country of my…