By MT Cozzola

It’s not that I haven’t entertained the notion of moving before. And it’s not that I think moving is some special thing you should only do if you’re twenty-something or retired or relocating for a job. So why am I so obsessed with the idea of moving that I spend hours in the middle of the night scrolling through Trulia, yet so paralyzed by the idea I can’t talk to a realtor?

It’s not even that I haven’t moved before. And it’s not that I feel incapable of moving now, though I accept that I will never love a house the way I love this one. Or is it that what I love are the experiences we’ve had fixing it up? Hanging out in it is also nice but it’s secondary. I can hang anywhere.

Maybe it’s that coming back from our road trip, I am suddenly so aware that there are all these other ways of living in this country. There are places with huge sky and hardly any people. There are places with pine forest. There are places with dog-friendly clothing stores.

But then again there’s so much I love here. Our friends, our family, our neighborhood, our lake, our gray slushy streets that turn beautiful with holiday lights. I love our theatres and our restaurants and the attitudes of people on the train. I love Harvestime. I love our middle-of-the-country modesty and the unfussiness of even our most passionate pursuits.

And would living in one of those places actually change anything? I’ll keep writing or I won’t. I’ll keep getting freelance jobs or I won’t, in which case I’ll have to get a real job, which will be super-stressful because I’ll have to show up somewhere consistently and probably learn how to work a cash register. That could happen anywhere.

Or could it? What if we pick one of these places I keep scrolling through, like Santa Fe or Flagstaff or southern Colorado, and we sell our wonderful house and move across the country and unpack somewhere else, and then realize we picked the wrong place or the wrong time or failed to do the one simple thing that would have guaranteed our success?

People move all the time. Sometimes they move back. But how? How do they prioritize all these conflicting emotions? How do they go forward? Is there one best way to figure this out?

Maybe I just have the order wrong. Move first, pick a place second.