When I first got off the beltway, I tried to equate what I saw with what I remembered. I smiled when I passed Ken’s Meat Market, the Java Cat coffee shop and Michael’s Frozen Custard, which was right across from the Monona Lakeview Apartments where I lived.  

In police parlance, my two-day excursion to Madison could have been thought of as returning to the scene of the crime. I came to Madison in October 2007 because I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere in particular. I was not comfortable with my family relationships. I didn’t have an employer or a sweetheart, and I was willing to find out if I could create a sense of belonging in a new place.

I let the sight of a full moon over Lake Mendota while boating with friends serve as a sign that moving to Madison (Wisconsin) should be the next logical step in my personal journey. As it turned out, finding a new job and integrating into new networks did not come easily.

I volunteered to usher at the Bartell Theatre. I took an improv course at the Coliseum Bar (from The Monkey Business Institute), and I met a handful of wonderful women and wrote with them once a week at a small arts center on Baldwin. I chanted and meditated in a shakti-filled hall at the eastern edge of town regularly.

But I never really became involved in theatre happenings at the Bartell (I did not share any sort of history with the resident companies). While I used to think of myself as a clever quipster, in ensemble exercises with much younger people, I was simply not very funny. And I never saw anyone from my writing group in between Wednesday nights.

I was not discovering a new sense of belonging. I was, in fact, having a new, deeper experience of feeling lost. I traded in one set of temp jobs in Chicago for a different set of temp jobs in Dane County.  The time I spent at my meditation center was sweet, but it engaged that part of me that recognizes I share the same inner space with everyone. I never went to the Cineplex or hung out at the mall with anyone I shared this space with.

Feeling lost was not just a generalized state. It was my everyday experience. With five lakes that dictated the layout of major thoroughfares, I was rarely able to get from one side of town to the other without consulting a map.

I saw counselors. I toyed with the idea of taking meds. I prayed. Between moments of surrender (What else could I do?), I spent a lot of time in bed shaking. My body just trembled.

And so it came to pass that just as I interpreted a full moon over Lake Mendota as a sign I should start a new life here, I interpreted a weekend job in Chicago as a good enough reason to move back.

Then life happened. Life kept happening. My car accident, my mother’s death, a few relationships with their corresponding break-ups, my trip to France and Spain, buying a new car, developing a relationship with John and buying a building together, hosting a few holiday meals (an unfamiliar family role for me).

I am sitting in the backyard garden of Cafe Zoma now, a green space the coffee shop shares with Absolutely Art, right by the bike path and community garden. I have often thought about my 10 months in Madison and my return to Chicago, to the city of straight streets and alleys. This is the first time I have been back.

People have often asked me if I regretted having come out here, assuming that since my life didn’t take root after moving here almost six years ago, it meant that I should look at the decision as a mistake.

Right now, my near year here feels like my junior year in high school. I was very aware of not fitting in. Maybe I could compare the daily trauma of finding myself on a dead-end without a clue on how to get back to Midvale or Willy Street to episodes of being bullied in the girls’ bathroom at Proviso East.

Then I will think about Friday arts walks or sunsets on Lake Monona, or drinking Spotted Cow at the Harmony Grill, or biking to the Capitol (at 284 feet, only 3 feet shorter than the nation’s Capitol), and I can’t imagine being where I am, being WHO I am, without my time in Dane County.

Time has a wonderful way of soothing pains and helping you recall good things.

You can’t see how you’ve grown until you can look at what you’ve grown through, and that’s no small thing.