Monday, March 27, 2006 | by nathan

Why I Live In Oklahoma

I wrote this as a part of Your Mom Already Knows, and I was just reading through it and thought I would share. Also, Brian and I had a discussion last night about what would happen if we found opportunities in another part of the country, and I got to wondering why the hell we don’t start looking.

Then I remembered. This. Enjoy. 

Why I Live In Oklahoma

    By the time I was fifteen I knew that I would leave Oklahoma as soon as the opportunity presented itself. It is, after all, not one of those areas where culture is made, it is not a New York, or Los Angeles. It’s not even one of those lower-teir cool places where Hollywood stars secretly live, like Austin.
    I used to sit and dream of what it would be like to live in Europe, and at twenty, I went to Europe for six months. I was one of only a very few people out of my high school class of 602 who went to an out-of-state college directly after high school; the counselors might have been a little uneasy about this, as it happened so seldom, but I was determined to forge a path for myself that was different than what anyone expected. I thought I was very cool, and very bohemian, for doing this.
    So I spent four years living in North Carolina. I came home for summers, and holidays, but I quickly began to think of Winston-Salem as home. My church was there, and it was close to the mountains, and the beach. By the end of the Christmas holiday my freshman year of college, my mother was asking, “So, when are you going back home?”
    This made me feel grown-up. Independent.
    Then, at twenty-two, I was brokenhearted and injured, and I knew that I needed a serious change of scenery. I was living just an hour and forty minutes by train from New York at the time, but was afraid to actually move there. George Bush had just begun screwing with the economy, and I had spent my entire senior year of college applying for over a hundred jobs who never called me back about my resume. I was working in a supermarket branch of a bank.
    Also, I was tired of not knowing anyone everywhere I went, and if you do not live there, New York can be a city made up of strangers. After several phone calls to old friends from high school, I decided that, for the time being, I would pack the back of my car with everything I owned and drive the 1800 miles home to Oklahoma, unload everything into my upstairs room at my mom’s house, and try to figure out my next move.
    About two months later I got a call from my good friend Jonathan, who had just started law school in Atlanta, and who wanted me to come and be his roommate. He had just started dating the woman who would become his wife, who was also a good friend of mine from college, and who was also moving to Atlanta to live with another close friend of ours who was working in campus ministry at Emory University. The three of them ganged up on me.
    “There are people who love you in Atlanta,” they would say in our frequent phone calls.
    “We’d have so much fun!”
    “I think Jesus wants you to move to Atlanta.”
    It got a little aggressive, and I would have freaked out except for the fact that I really wanted to go. And yet here I was in Oklahoma, with no job, broke, and you want me to move when? Jonathan called one day in March to let me know that he would need me to be there by the beginning of May.
    I redoubled my efforts to find a job, but in a post-9/11 economy (if we have learned nothing from Bush, it’s that you can always blame the terrorists), a religion degree does not carry a lot of weight, no matter where you went to school. I sent out hundreds of applications. I became desperate enough to apply for a job at Wal-Mart, but I could not bring myself to go through with it.
    My savings was quickly running dry, and the more I prayed about it, the more my resolve to leave home once more was beginning to waver. When this happens I usually start to talk big, as if I am going to pack up and go tomorrow. I assured my mom and all of my friends that I was going soon, just as soon as I got some money.
    I continued to pray, because this is what I do when I have no clue where I’m going. The novelist E.L. Doctorow once said that writing a novel is a lot like driving a car at night; you can only see as far in front of you as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. I find that many times when I get into a jam, the only thing I can see in front of me is asking for help.
    So I prayed, and my resolve wavered. And, as is typical of God when you ask Her for help, several things happened in rapid succession, almost like the firing of a gun.
    I picked up the phone to discuss the matter with Jonathan one day, and he mentioned that he and his parents had had a major blowout over the whole deal, because they, while very nice people, just did not want their son living with a gay man. This was a problem for them, and Jonathan, punk rocker that he is, fought back with his considerable passion, and the conversation did not go well. He assured me that we were still on schedule, and despite my insistence that I not be a problem between him and his parents, he said that I should still plan on coming. I said okay, uneasily, as I still had no money.
    A few days later I mentioned to my good friend, Erica, that I was planning on moving to Atlanta soon. She became despondent.
    “But you just got here!” she moaned sadly. I felt like the Grinch.
    I kept praying. It felt like a game of Pong in my brain most of the time. I would decide to move, to risk the rest of my savings and pack up for Atlanta. The next minute I would realize, suddenly, that I was desperately in need of my family, of stability, and that another major change right now would, in all likelihood, result in my shooting up a post office or taking up hustling underneath an overpass.
    As usually happens when I am chewing over an idea, I talked the whole thing to death to anybody who would listen. At parties, I would lay out my lists of pros and cons in deep, deep detail, doing everything but drawing a flow chart. People got sick of hearing it. “Just decide something,” they would say.
    I’m not a decisive person. Perhaps this comes from growing up in a household where evening conversation went something like this:
    “What do you want for dinner?”
    “I don’t know. What do you want?”
    “I don’t care. Whatever you want.”
    “I don’t care.”
    We would dance like this until either someone decided or begged not to decide. I wanted so badly not to let anyone down in my decision, especially not myself. I was already in a fragile place emotionally, and gradually I began to understand that no matter what I decided, it must be the choice that I knew to be best for myself.
    I kept praying.
    Life does not flow neatly from convenient moment to convenient moment, like in a movie. There are moments of intensity, like punctuations at the end of sentences, between spans of mind-numbing boredom and beautiful afternoons and rainy mornings when you have no idea how to keep going. But at some point I realized that a big part of me did not want to go to Atlanta.
    At nineteen I thought of not going to Europe. I had been accepted to the programs that I was interested in, and was all set to go, and doubt overcame me. A campus minister with whom I was meeting at the time saw that I was wrestling with “God’s will.” I could not figure out if God wanted me to go to Europe, or to stay in North Carolina for the next six months. Finally he said something that has stuck with me ever since.
    He said, “Maybe God isn’t worried about what you do here. It’s not like God went and hid his will from you, and now your job is to read the treasure map correctly. If going to Europe makes you feel terrified and anxious, you should listen to that. But if the only reason for this doubt is because you are getting to do something you actually want to do, then you should definitely go.”
    I ruminated on these words. I marinated in them. The thought of going to Atlanta, of uprooting myself and my life in a major way for the fourth time in two years, filled me with a dread akin to skydiving or bungee jumping, both of which I have sworn never to do. It felt like going willingly to my own death. Yes, there were people there who loved me, but I had that where I was, and I did not have to spend money, or make a bunch of new friends, or learn how to drive in a new city, all over again.
    I did not have another fresh start in me just then, and the more I prayed, the more I came to know that this was Okay.
    I called Jonathan.
    “I’m sorry, dude. I’ve been thinking about it, and I just can’t do it. There’s no money, there’s no time to get money…”
    He cut me off. “Hey man, I was just going to call you. The apartment deal fell apart, the other guy who was going to live with us decided he didn’t want to have two roommates.”
    He apologized quickly and began telling me how he could find me a roommate if I still wanted to come, but I was barely listening; relief such as I have rarely known washed over me. I knew that this was what was meant to happen.
    Nobody in Atlanta was disappointed in me; they were sad I was not going to come live near them, but they understood, as friends do. I stayed in Oklahoma, where I have been for over three years.
    And now, when people ask me why I stay here, or when people come to visit from out of town, and they wonder what it is that is so great about my medium-sized midwestern city, my home town, that would make me want to stay when I could be anywhere else, this is what I tell them:
    I have a house here. You think I’m going to just give up all the equity we’ve built up?
    Also – mainly – I stay here because it is home. My family (big F and little f) are here, and it is the relentless love and unflinching tenderness they have shown me over the past three years that has tied my frayed rope into a knot for me and helped me to hold on. My church is here, my lifeboat of community to whom I am learning to cling through the political and spiritual storms, which are many in the Bible Belt.
    I live in Oklahoma because there are more gay people here who do not know how fundamentally Okay they are in God’s eyes than almost anywhere else I have ever been. I stay because in the summer you can drive out into the prairie and smell all that dust, and the sand plums growing by the road, and because in the spring, when the winter wheat comes in, the green of it is so vibrant you think your eyes might pop with it. Because the skies are so big and huge that they feel like an overfilled balloon, like the inside of me when I have my family gathered around me.
    I live in Oklahoma because Oklahoma, my home, is who I am in a way that is so fundamental that you cannot understand it unless it is your home too. I stay for the Indian paintbrush in the summertime, and the football in the autumn.
    I stay because home is the place that when you have to go there, they have to take you in, and my family took me in every single time I ever came wandering home all prodigal and broken. I live in Oklahoma because I choose to, and I choose to live here because it is not Heaven, especially if you are gay, but it is not Hell; it is like my life: flat and rolling and ordinary and everyday, but filled with more love and secrets and surprises than anyplace else I have ever been, or ever will be.