Peetsborg

The past four years saw me living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was back and forth for longer thanks to college shenanigans, but I was firmly settled out there since the summer of 2012. And now, here we are, summer of 2016, and I'm on the opposite side of the state. 

On Wednesday I went out with my dad after being back in my hometown for a little over a month, to do the final cleaning of the house I had lived in for two of those years. I saw all three of my prior roommates that evening, and one of my best friends as well, all of whom participated in taking out the remaining evidence of our inhabiting the building. My dad and I crashed there for the night. I was up until 3AM, ensuring the house was impeccable for the next inhabitants. 

The focus of intense housework, combined with the wandering mind of someone too far gone into the night that one might call it morning, left me with some heavy thoughts. Sure, I had lived in Pittsburgh for four years, solidly. I infrequently went to my parents' house, usually only for holidays. I missed out on a lot of small events and milestones. I grew distant from my brother and parents, as we lost sense of how to interact with each other on the day to day. We're undergoing the process of bridging these gaps. It's not good or bad. It just is, and you deal accordingly.

But that meant I had made Pittsburgh my home. I have a family out there, of sorts. My relationships with a vast number of human lives in the area of south western PA have come and gone, growing and evolving. I've changed. I've learned what friendships stick, what it takes to maintain them, to cultivate them. I've learned caring with purpose and I developed an insight, a strong sense of empathy. I probably should have been a Psych major, but alas...

Every part of that house that I cleaned, getting down on my hands and knees to scrub at the baseboards, stretching up onto the tips of my toes to dust the ceiling fans - it all stuck with me. I can't put the experiences of that single house into one word or feeling, let alone my whole life in Pittsburgh. It all rolls up into this tangled knot of complex emotion and growth. It makes my head spin. It makes my heart ache. It makes me laugh. 

Most of all it reminds me of catching a Greyhound bus in Philadelphia. In line there was this elderly man with a beard as thick as his Russian accent. He seemed confused as to where to stand to get on the correct bus, and eventually found an available attendant to tug the sleeve of. 

"Ees thees buzs goink to Peetsborg?" he asked, gesturing with his luggage. It was. He fell asleep early on in the ride. He slept through the rest stop at Sideling Hill. He slept right up until the bus started winding around the bend near the Oakland exit, where the river wanders off into the distance on your left towards the Point, where Downtown sits beyond a crosshatch of bridges. When he roused from his slumber, he pointed and cried, "Eet ees, Peetsborg??" 

And I nodded to myself, knowing a loved one would be there to pick me up from the bus station, to ask me how my trip was, give me a big hug. Knowing I was home.