Moving for a Boy Who Had a Secret Girlfriend

Three months after I graduated from Vanderbilt in May of 2023, my mom's boyfriend died of pancreatic cancer.

I wasn't supposed to go home for longer than the summer. I was slated to move to Manhattan and intern with a literary agent who represented my creative writing professor. But suddenly, I felt obligated to stay home and hold my mother's hand through her grief. So, I adjusted to living back at home. I watched my mother collect books on grief and life after the death of a loved one. She even joined a counseling group. She cried less and less.

Eventually, I decided to take a trip back to Nashville to visit my best friend from college. An old fling heard through the grapevine that I would be coming to town and asked if I'd stay with him for a few nights.

As things go, we played house for a week: walked his dog around East Nashville parks, shared cigarettes at Duke's, made homemade pesto while Otis Redding floated from his record player. I fell right back in love. Late one night, curled up in his navy sheets, he asked me a question I had pushed into the back of my mind.

What if you moved back to Nashville?

Had he asked me three months ago, I would have said no way. Who was going to take care of my mother? But she was doing so well. She would never outlive her grief, but she was learning to live with it.

I applied for a job in Nashville and told no one. A week after I returned home from the trip, I was offered the job. Suddenly, I had a decision to make. And as much as I wanted to deny it, the driving force behind the decision was the boy.

I loved him, and I thought he loved me.

I pulled the trigger. I accepted the job, took over a lease from a mutual friend, and moved to Nashville six weeks later.

On the road trip from Portland to Nashville I broke the news. I was moving to Nashville! We could finally try being together for real.

That's when he told me he had a girlfriend.

I was crushed, with all of my belongings packed in boxes behind me. Doubt seeped into every pore in my body. Was it too late to turn back?

Despite my doubt, this isn't a story about regret. The job I took in Nashville was in the psychiatric emergency department of Vanderbilt children's hospital. For six months, I did some of the most difficult yet rewarding work of my life. I did fall in love, but with someone else, someone I wouldn't have met had I not moved back. And though my stint back in Nashville didn't last longer than a year and a half, it was the experience of burning out at the hospital and realizing I wanted to write full-time that motivated me to apply for MFA programs.

Now, I live in Brooklyn, where I write and surround myself with literature all day. Every day, I'm living a life I never would have even dreamed of.

I want to hate the boy for inciting such a life-changing decision. But the truth is, I can't thank him enough.