It’s a Sunday night in mid-August and once again, we’re checking our phones every thirty seconds. “If someone is trying to spend less time on their phones,” I tell Jacob, “they shouldn’t try to buy a house.” The phone rings. “I’m so sorry,” our realtor tells us yet again, “you didn’t get the house.” Crushed, dejected, disappointed, we go back to dinner. This is our eighth offer in four months; we wonder if we’ll ever have a home again.

 An hour later, the phone rings again. Jean’s voice has a different edge this time. “Guess what?” she says. “You know how sometimes the sellers change their mind at the last minute? Well, it happened again. The house is yours if you still want it.” Jacob and I lock eyes in disbelief; I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. “I’ve been dreaming of hearing you say those words for months,” I tell Jean. After we hang up the phone, we sit in shocked silence. My dinner lies entirely forgotten. Is this really it?

Blame it on hindsight bias, but something was different about this house. When I first found the listing, I looked at the photos on repeat for 48 hours, something I’d never done in the hundreds (thousands?) of houses we’d looked at over the past eight months. When we walked into the entry I gasped involuntarily, my hands clutched under my chin. It needed some work, but it was the most amazing house I’d ever seen. “We have to get you this house,” Jean said after she saw me hyperventilating over the blush pink tiled bathroom. 

Running through the house was a thread of familiarity, but how, since I’d never been here before in my life? It wasn’t until our offer got accepted that I remembered—I had seen this house before. A year ago, when we first started thinking about moving, I’d had a vision of our next home: an understated mid-century house in a quiet neighborhood, shrouded in leafy vegetation. I’d given up hope of ever finding it, and yet here it stood.

When we decided to make an offer on the house, Jean informed us that the odds weren’t in our favor. There were two other offers in hand: one that was cash; one that was higher than ours and waived inspection. All we had to offer were our emotions. I wrote a heartfelt letter to the sellers, whose parents had built the house in 1957. It was their dream family home; four children and a legacy were raised within its walls. The house was so beloved it was mentioned in the owner’s obituary earlier this year. I stressed that its integrity would not be lost with us. We crossed our fingers and knocked on wood; shot up a prayer and tried not to jinx our chances. This wasn't the first time we’d put our faith into an emotional appeal. I only hoped it would work this time. 

When we heard the good news, I asked Jean what swayed the sellers’ minds. “It was your letter,” she replied. “They felt that the house should belong to you.” 

Moving has been a much harder process than we ever anticipated, but this is the house that makes it all worth it. On our first night we had champagne and chipotle; take a picture, my sister said, this is a historic moment. We went to sleep on a camping mattress in an echoing room cocooned by crickets and whispering leaves. It’s the closest I’ve felt to being home in months.

For better or worse, the places where you grow up get under your skin. A city that may be no more than a stopping place for a parent becomes drenched with meaning for you, their child, for it’s the place where you learned how to be. To the untrained eye your hometown might not seem like much more than a heap of telephone wires and crepe myrtle bushes—certainly you know now there are more exciting places to live—but for awhile, or maybe always, the place you grew up is the truest place you know.

I keep trying to grasp what makes a place feel like home but the specifics keep slipping through my fingers. Is it simply the abundance of memories? Or the most vivid place you felt secure and loved? Or the place where your younger self is forever memorialized? Or maybe a combination of all three, plus a little intangible extra? My family moved around enough during my formative years that I dreamed wistfully of growing up in a small town where everyone knew each other, a la Stars Hollow. What would it be like to have so much shared history in a place? I lamented the bonds that grew brittle with every move. But I had to have roots somehow; even though I was twelve by the time we moved to Oklahoma, it’s still the place I thought of as home for thirteen years.

Last week I traveled back to that hot, beautiful state to help my sister move to Michigan. Lurking on every street corner were ghosts of former lives lived, tantalizingly close but made elusive by the veil of time. We were here and we mattered, they whispered. In the afternoon, when everything was crystallized in a slick of shimmering heat, Mimi and I visited the pool we used to frequent. We treaded water and romanticized the naive people we used to be. Now that our parents have moved overseas, we wistfully realized Oklahoma doesn’t feel like home anymore. Cliche as it is, home isn’t home without your people, and in their absence we are having to learn new ways to be ourselves.

Is it a loss of identity we’re grappling with, or is it just growing up? It’s easy to think of the past as the way things should always be.

Longing happens in the gut. I know this because when when I walk the neighborhoods in the evening and I smell someone else’s dinner cooking and hear the sophisticated clink of cutlery on porcelain it feels like a sucker punch. From the windowpanes radiates a family in a glow cast wide enough to illuminate something I’m missing. I can’t decide if I’m fantasizing about being a parent or a child. 

I know I want to be a mother someday—I want the chaos of family dinners, the skinned knees and sticky skin, the curiosity of souls that are simultaneously their father’s and mine and their own. I want to be sealed together as a family. But the thought also terrifies me. I know that once I push a baby from my body there will be no turning back. Am I strong enough to make such enormous sacrifices, both physically and mentally? “You’re scared because you care,” Rachel tells me. She had a baby last fall, a button-eyed cherub named Saili. “It’s all so worth it. You are stronger than you think.” I can tell from the certainty in her voice that she’s discovered this strength within herself too.

It dawned on me recently my life is nothing but a cycle of reoccurring themes, which is both comforting and maddening. Comforting because hopefully I am growing, maddening because I can’t believe I still haven’t learned my lesson. Not for the first time and most certainly not for the last, the relinquishment of control has been a painfully persistent theme. 

For example, the other week I forced myself to go to the doctor, which I hate doing because I am forced to ponder my own mortality. I also hate the doctor’s because I know it’s something I should do but never make time for, then stress myself out thinking I’m dying from some silent killer while being overwhelmed at the thought of making an appointment and having to address said silent killer, if it exists, even though I appear to be perfectly healthy. 

At the doctor’s office, while you are being weighed and pricked and palpated, there is this strange limbo in which anything is possible. After this appointment, I think, my life could change. A nurse named Fawn straps on a blood pressure cuff and pumps the bulb. Maybe I’ll have to undergo cancer treatments or go on a strict diet. I can feel the blood pulsing in my fingers, then released all at once. Maybe I’ll have to inject myself with needles everyday. These are not things I hope for, but they could happen. Life could change at any moment and most of it isn’t up to me. This, too, is both comforting and maddening. There is no controlling anything, not really. Cliche as it is, the present moment is all there is. 

I’d like to think that I will continue to soften as I get older, that surrendering to the processes of life will come more naturally. It’s like pulling teeth, but maybe I am learning: when I was 18, relinquishing control was admitting defeat. At almost 25, it feels like a relief.