I'm moving back to the suburbs!
I never thought I'd be telling my friends that. Which I didn't, actually. For most of you, I made it sound much more exciting by saying, We're going on a cross-country road trip!
A road trip that did, indeed, start with physically moving back to my childhood home.
Unlike New England-native Will, I was raised in a house built made-to-order for my parents at the turn of the century (we moved in circa fall 2000), in what was a sleepy suburb outside a sleepy capital city.
When I was in high school, I would visit my dad in San Francisco and dream of bigger cities, better transit, all-night art parties, and dimly lit rooftop bars playing music I would never listen to on iTunes but to which I would happily sip an overpriced cocktail.
Many of you already know my Lady Bird story (Catholic schoolgirl escapes to NYC only to feel mad nostalgia during a Sunday morning hangover... yep, that was me). But after graduating with a Computer Science degree from NYU's School of Engineering, rather than staying in Brooklyn, I reluctantly moved back to California for my first full-time job to build math learning games (it was too good to be true!).
About a month after I landed in the Bay Area, I met Will, a handsome, energetic, and candid East Coaster who had made the opposite coastal switch for college, hailing from the North Shore of Boston. He had moved to the great California metropolis of San Jose (technically Santa Clara, I suppose, but isn't it all the same?) to attend Santa Clara University. By the time we met, he had been living in the Bay Area for seven-ish years and longed to find a more permanent home.
Now, almost four years later, we're off on that search, in as permanent as a quarter-million-mile car can be for now. I finished a major stint at my last job, we closed the lease on our first apartment together, and, thanks to my mom's incredibly spacious 2,000+ sqft. suburban house, we put all of our things in her storage unit of a garage. Couldn't have done it without you, EG!
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to sharing our upcoming adventures with you all! -Maddie
