Familiar but Foreign

Returning to the U.S. and realizing you've changed more than the place has.

Downtown Murfreesboro, TN

I stood in the aisle, looking at the case full of makeup wipes. “Will, look at this. They lock up the Neutrogena wipes now.”

We were standing in a Walmart Supercenter in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, stocking up on U.S. products. The last time I’d been in a Walmart, lots of unexpected products—like pregnancy tests—were locked up, but makeup wipes?

I hit the button to call over an associate to open the case. He arrived quickly, and I watched as he took out a phone, punched some buttons, and the case popped open.

“You can open the locked cases digitally now?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s supposed to be so that more people can open them, but they don’t always work right.”

He handed me my makeup wipes, and then he was off to help another customer.

It wasn’t the first time I realized something had changed in an unexpected way since moving out of the U.S., but it was the one that stood out most clearly. I’ve written about the ways in which life moves on without us, but here I was witnessing it in real time.

The small city we'd called home for nearly a decade had kept busy while we were gone. Medical Center Parkway, once a stretch of big-box stores and chain restaurants, now had an In-N-Out where a field used to be, new apartment buildings as far as we could see, and a shiny new Trader Joe’s on the other side of the street.

We drove through our old neighborhood, where dozens of new houses had been built in our absence and streets had been paved and readied for traffic. Across the road from the neighborhood, homes were being demolished to make way for new shops and residences. It all looked so familiar but foreign.

Just up the road from our neighborhood was a gas station we used to frequent for snacks, drinks, and the occasional breakfast biscuit. The owners also owned a building across the street that sat empty for years. Everyone speculated about what it could be—an ice cream shop, burger joint, market. To our dismay, it was gone. The road had been widened, and a new traffic light had taken its place.

As I looked around at all the changes in this town I’d called home for so long, I realized I’d also changed. I no longer fit quite so smoothly into this puzzle, and even if I could, would I want to?

It was shiny suburbia, with everything I could ever want or need at my disposal. Yet what it required of me were tradeoffs I didn’t want: car life, much less physical activity, food that made me ill the first couple of days in the U.S., and buildings built for function rather than beauty. Everything felt like … too much. Too much food, too much car, too much traffic, too many choices, too much sitting in a car, too many people.

Two years ago, Madrid would’ve felt like one of the most foreign places I’d ever been, but when we landed to make our way home to Valencia, I exhaled. The familiar sounds of Spanish floated in the air around me, and my body immediately relaxed—like it was okay to walk to baggage claim rather than pushing, shoving, and walk-running to the carousel.

“Home,” I thought.

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I write here about building a life abroad—slowly, imperfectly, and with a lot of trial and error.

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