Always From "Off"

I took a short break. I appreciate your patience. As you’ll see below, I ended up with the flu. Desperately trying to get well, I then powered through two eye surgeries, and was unable to see until two days ago.

And now I can see!

So I’m back at a full sprint, pushing toward publication of my debut domestic suspense novel, Forever Gone in May. More on that later. Lots more. You’ll be sick of hearing about it, I assure you.

Well, I’ve done it to myself. There is no one else to blame. If you’ve read many of my prior posts, you know I’ve struggled with the definitions of home, community, and how to be comfortable living in a different country. This week, for the first time, I saw the change in myself and how I feel about where I am now.

Friendship is challenging for me. I don’t do well at small talk and find it difficult to make fast friends in each new city. Yes, I occasionally have acquaintances and friends to lunch with, but I rarely find someone I trust enough to be a real friend, the ride-or-die variety.

Before I stopped practicing law, I had many work “friends,” but they never resided in the same city as I did. I went to law school in a different state. When I graduated, I moved from Alabama to South Carolina, where my mother lived. Setting up a law practice in a different state in the South was difficult when you did not attend elementary school with the other lawyers in the legal community.

I was always the competition. It made for a great career because I never had to worry about ripping a friend to shreds in the courtroom or being concerned with the personal fallout when I beat their clients down in a negotiation. The goal was to win. It made life simple.

When working as a lawyer, of course, there were people I trusted. It’s hard to have a legal career without an extensive network. But my work friends were scattered around the U.S. and never close by. We would catch up during conferences and by email, but we were never in the same city for more than a day or two. I’ve worked remotely since 2004, and other than a group of my company’s managers I saw regularly, there was no water cooler chitchat and no friends nearby to crab about the latest scandal in banking or real estate.

It was challenging to help my children find friends each time we moved when I had no idea how to do it myself. I still don’t. I’m not sure I ever will. I’m a loner, happier with myself or my small nuclear family, and adventures with a friend here and there.

And now here I am, a solo traveler mostly, with friends who reside in emails, quick telephone calls from time to time, and snatches of updates through Instagram. While I do meet people in each new city, without fail, they soon move away, and I shift them to the list of folks I text regularly, watch on social media, and try to see maybe once a year.

With each new city where we’ve lived, it was always tricky. The most challenging city of all was Charleston. While revisiting the Lowcountry recently, I was reminded that I’m perpetually from “off.” The first time this expression arose, I wasn’t sure they were discussing my residential status or mental faculties.

What is “off?” I asked several people I knew. My question was met with laughter, but rather than telling me the answer, they would change the subject. Finally, one confided the definition. Charleston is a peninsula, and if you were not born and raised on that peninsula, you are from “off the peninsula,” therefore, as the locals say, “from off.”

To me, this was no big deal. It was simply a fact. I had little concern until I was introduced to this way a second time several months later. At that point, I learned that being from “off” meant you weren’t accepted into “the” friend group. You were a bystander, an outsider, someone unimportant. For god’s sake, I was in my fifties. Why did I care? I don’t know, but I was simultaneously embarrassed and hurt. How could people from the city repeatedly voted by various magazines as the “best” in the U.S. and “one of the friendliest” be so rude?

It’s not quite up there with “Bless Your Heart,” but it’s close.

All this came rushing back. In Charleston to visit family and have my annual visit with my doctor, I also tried to see my friends and cram too many things into three days. I decided this trip not to stay with family but to use my remaining free hotel nights and treat myself to a mini vacation. Ever been on one of those vacations that didn’t work no matter how hard you tried?

I woke up the second day with the flu. And as one does when one is sick and traveling far from home, you wish desperately to be smuggled down tight in your bed. You want to be home. Waiting in the Charleston airport that last day, I watched the flights land and taxi to the terminal, desperate to be in warm Miami with a bowl of my husband’s chicken soup or snuggled with the dogs in Türkey. I didn’t care which home, just one of them.

And then, I was. With Spanish floating around me and the warm air making me feel instantly better, even with the flu, I was home, where everyone is from “off,” and no one truly cares.