My polyamorous relationship to places

Can you call more than one place home?

Airplane flying over city.
(Image credit: iStock/SamAntonioPhotography)

For a long time, I thought I would live in my hometown forever.

This was a tricky conviction because it was based on both love and fear — happiness bounded by dread. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, or rather just outside it. My parents' house was in farm country and my school was in a halfhearted suburb that still felt more like town surrounded by forest than the other way around. I cut classes and went into the woods, lay down on the moss, and read about places I already believed I would never live in. I loved Portland, loved everything about it, and the things I maybe didn't love — its sheer distance from other cities, its steeply rising cost of living, and its apparent need to distance itself from its weird, charming, scruffy past in a bid for cultural legitimacy — I had to find a way to love, because where else was I ever going to feel this comfortable, this safe? My reasoning was: You only get one hometown.

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Sarah Marshall's writings on gender, crime, and scandal have appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, Fusion, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015, among other publications. She tweets @remember_Sarah.