Alexandra Charitan

A beautiful spring day in Northeast Ohio.

When I was little, I watched The Wizard of Oz so much that I wore out our family’s VHS copy. I have no idea why our tape had a muted mauve plastic outer shell instead of black; what’s less of a mystery is why the movie’s central protagonist—a young girl who feels misunderstood and out of place growing up in Kansas and longs to “wake up where the clouds are far behind” her—resonated so deeply with me, a young girl who felt misunderstood and out of place growing up in perpetually cloudy Northeast Ohio.

When I got a bit older and was able to identify some of the concrete issues contributing to my unease, I began to obsess over the idea of finding my own version of a place where the “dreams I dare to dream really do come true.” Even before I first visited New York City when I was 14, it seemed to me that—while I had no illusions that any change of scenery would cause my troubles to “melt like lemon drops”—going over the George Washington Bridge and into Manhattan was about as close to going over the rainbow as I could get.

I did try to be at least somewhat realistic about New York City’s ability to heal my spiritual and physical wounds, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t idealize or inflate its powers. For more than a decade after that first visit, I still physically lived in Ohio, but my head and my heart were both trapped in limbo—somewhere between my increasingly bleak real life, and the objectively better one I imagined was waiting for me, should I ever actually make it to New York.

I’m not proud of how quickly and willingly I cast my Ohio roots aside when that day finally came in 2013. Before my plane had even reached the gate at LaGuardia, I had already scrubbed my vocabulary of any telltale signs that I was an outsider: I trained my Midwestern mouth to say “soda” instead of “pop,” I would order food “to stay” instead of “for here,” and wait “on line” instead of “in line.” I gladly surrendered my Ohio driver’s license, even if it meant a five-and-a-half-hour wait at the “express” DMV and an even more excruciating weeks-long wait for my photo reveal (mercifully, New York’s ID photos are printed in universally flattering shades of black and white).

I didn’t hide the fact that I was from Ohio, but I didn’t exactly volunteer to share my origin story either. When the Cleveland Cavaliers won the NBA championship in 2016, it seemed like everyone in Brooklyn was celebrating but me. I was the first to admit that so-called “flyover” states were easy to ridicule (and frequently misunderstood), but more often than not, my home state supplied seemingly endless sources of embarrassment.

I had helped the county I grew up in turn blue in favor of Obama twice; in 2016, Trump won the bellwether state by nearly half a million votes. In 2019, less than a year before he would deftly handle the COVID-19 pandemic, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed the notorious “heartbeat” law, essentially banning abortions. And that desire to wake up where the clouds are far behind me was very real: The Buckeye State is consistently included in the top ten rankings of cloudiest places in America. According to the Farmers’ Almanac, cities just south of Lake Erie see only 63 to 68 days of sunshine a year. Two months before I headed east in search of (metaphorically and literally) sunnier skies, I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis; while there are several contributing risk factors, a pronounced lack of vitamin D is one of the major ones.

Try as I did to remain objective, I was not immune to blaming my miseries, at least partially, on my surroundings; with some perspective, it’s clear that I was not completely wrong in that assessment. My life did improve measurably in ways both big and small after I moved to New York. I no longer had a car, so I walked significantly more. I spent more time outdoors, enjoying those objectively sunnier skies. I traveled more, developed meaningful relationships, and advanced in my career.

Over the past seven years, I’ve gone entire days without remembering that I carry a potentially debilitating neurological condition along with me wherever I go; is it nearly invisible because of the daily medication I take or because of the lifestyle changes I made? I’m sure, like anything, it’s a complicated mix of factors, but I have no doubt that moving to New York helped me thrive in many, quantifiable ways.

So when it became clear to me over the last year that my life in New York was coming to a natural end, I wondered where I would go next. I had planned to spend a large portion of 2020 on the road, traveling across rural America—including the true Midwest, to which I argue Northeast Ohio does not really belong. I wasn’t being coy when I declared that I had no idea where I would end up once my trip ended; I truly had no idea if I would want to restart my life in New York or plant new roots elsewhere. For the first time in my highly-structured, true-to-my-Virgo-nature life, I planned not to plan too far in advance. I hoped that a few months on the road would change me; somewhere along the way I imagined that a clearer path would emerge.

A family of squirrels outside of my childhood bedroom window.

Well it turns out that sometimes life is also what happens to you while you're busy not making other plans. I did leave New York, but the COVID-19 pandemic put my road trip plans on an indefinite hold, left me unemployed (at least for the time being), and has me sheltering in place with my dad in my childhood home in Ohio. When I moved out in 2009—to live with a boyfriend 45 minutes south—I never imagined I’d be back 11 years later.

During the seven years that I lived in New York, I’d visited Ohio several times—for holidays, short family visits, and most recently, for work-related functions—but never for more than a few days at a time. I enjoyed exploring my home state as a tourist, catching up with old friends, and eating at regional food chains (Swensons’ cheeseburgers truly are life-changing). But I was always eager to get back to my adopted home of New York which, for at least six-and-a-half years, felt more like home to me than Ohio ever did. I had built a life from scratch there, and I relished the control and autonomy. It wasn’t perfect, but it was mine—and I tried not to take it for granted.

The harder I worked to scrub the “Ohio” from my life, the more I started to warm to its charms. All but invisible when I was living a life that had, for various reasons, never felt like my own—and with enough distance and perspective—they started to slowly reveal themselves. A day spent in Amish country used to be anything but relaxing; the inconvenience of getting stuck behind a painfully slow buggy, the fecund smell of farmland, and the lines of Midwestern moms waiting for free cheese samples all tested my tissue-paper-thin patience in different ways. But gradually, I not only stopped dreading my return visits, but actually started to look forward to driving those same rural roads in search of a weird roadside attraction, an abandoned cemetery, or a sprawling suburban grocery store.

Since I arrived at the end of March, I’ve had nothing but time to consider the pros and cons of Ohio. During the two weeks I spent in quarantine, I took daily walks, never straying too far from the same streets and sidewalks on which I used to wander as an angsty teen (and later, as an angsty college student). After it was clear that I wasn’t a vector of viral plague, I began to go farther, driving my grandpa’s ‘98 Buick to points both north and south. I explored an abandoned bridge, drove two hours just to photograph a storefront, and visited the former Longaberger Basket headquarters twice. I still take walks as often as I can and I’ve come to appreciate these daily sojourns as a sort of “this is your life” review of my past.

Within walking distance of my house is the church parking lot where I learned to parallel park, the orthodontist who tortured my tiny mouth with a Medieval palatal expander, and the playground where a friend and I used to sneak cigarettes. Today, I couldn’t parallel park a clown car if my life depended on it. I long ago lost my retainer and regained my snaggle tooth. I could never tolerate the taste of cigarettes, and I’ve since lost touch with that friend. She was the first person I told when I realized I was attracted to women; it would be 20 more years before I could finally come to terms with what that meant personally—and feel secure enough to declare it to the world.

With the Buick, I can go even further into my own history: to the drive-in movie theater where I first got my period, to the neighborhood street where I had my first kiss (with a boy), and to the college campus where I met my first girlfriend. I recently drove past the house I shared for more than four years with that notorious boyfriend—the one I grew to resent because I blamed him for keeping me in Ohio, and then later, for other much worse (and more objectively bad) reasons. He doesn’t live there anymore, and now, thankfully, I barely recognize the version of myself that did. My journal entries from that time in my life are laughably morose; now, I write things such as, “I’m proud of myself” and “I can’t lose anything that never rightly belonged to me,” without any shred of irony.

The things that I couldn’t wait to leave behind—suburban sprawl, a car-dependent society, desolate streets—are the very things that now make Ohio feel like a literal breath of fresh air. Yes, it’s still perpetually cloudy, and the weather is hilariously unpredictable; in the weeks that I’ve been here we’ve had several inches of snow, rain, hail, a tornado warning, and a few picture-perfect 70-degree days (there is a frost advisory today and next week is supposed to be in the mid-80s). Regardless of the weather, I still take those walks, during which I rarely encounter another person. I used to lament the lack of sidewalks and foot traffic, but now I’m grateful for the ability to clear my head without playing a game of human Frogger—a mild New York annoyance that became increasingly stressful as COVID-19 ravaged the city and everyone, whether they intended to or not, suddenly posed a real threat to my compromised immune system.

I haven’t shed my New York persona completely, and I likely never will. I still recoil from strangers’ friendliness, walk to the grocery store even though I have access to the Buick, and relish wearing a face mask because it means I never have to force a smile (minus the face mask, I did those things even when I lived in Ohio, to be fair). I don’t regret a minute of the time I spent living in New York. I realize that no life choice is one-size-fits-all, but I do think most people would benefit from the perspective gained when you leave behind the comfort of familiar surroundings and leap into the unknown. There are as many ways to do that as there are people in this world; I urge you to figure out what that means for you, and then actually do it.

Against a backdrop of ‘90s playlists and Jane Fonda’s audiobook, I had more than seven hours to think and re-imagine my future when I left New York, driving west over the George Washington Bridge. Suddenly, what had before seemed so unclear—where to put down roots when my road trip came to an end—seemed maddeningly obvious. What if I just stayed in Ohio for the foreseeable future?

Even before the pandemic suddenly shuttered (hopefully temporarily) everything that I loved about New York, I had become increasingly disillusioned with the high costs—again, both literally and metaphorically—of carving out a life in one of the most expensive and dense cities in the world. The cost of living is much lower in Ohio; yes, I will need a car, but I now relish the control and freedom it will bring me, especially in a post-pandemic world. Everything that was a nightmare even in pre-COVID-19 New York is a comparative breeze here—laundry, grocery shopping, road trips, etc. There are just as many things that I will (and already do) miss about New York as there are things that I won’t.

But what I’m learning is that nothing in life is objectively good or bad; for a brief moment, most things may be weighted heavily in one direction or the other, but more often than not, they fall somewhere in between. I moved to New York because, for many reasons unique to me at the time, it seemed like a better choice than Ohio. Now I, and the reasons, have changed, with predictably different results.

Will I stay in Ohio forever? I have absolutely no clue. Is it the right place for me right now? I think so. It may look different than it once did, but I’m extremely grateful to have a place to come back to—even if it doesn’t feel like I’m going back, but rather, forward. I lost the puzzle box long ago; I have no idea what the final picture will look like, but I’m picking up the pieces and connecting them as I find them.

As smart and clever as I’d like to think I am, sometimes the most obvious solutions are the most elusive. During the years I was busy building a life in New York, I would have insisted that I would never end up back in Ohio. Even now, I’m dragging my feet surrendering that driver’s license—and not just because I like my photo, it’s valid for six more years, and the wait in the stuffy and chaotic Midtown DMV felt as if it was at least that long.

I’m reluctant to admit that something so cliché—something that must have embedded itself into the tightly-woven fabric of my brain long before that fragile VHS tape turned to dust—could turn out to be so true: “If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with … There’s no place like home.”