On returning to places I used to live (Phoenix)
Moving to Phoenix to heal, returning four years later to reminisce.
At 18 years old I was enveloped by the need to chase freedom and I finally caught it in Phoenix, Arizona.
After a year and a half of recovering from post concussion syndrome and seven months of being quarantined in my childhood bedroom, moving out west was a chance to start my life. A change to finally come into my own by being on my own. It was about finding the version of myself that wasn’t sick and scared and stuck.
I moved into my very first apartment on Friday, January 15, 2021 with Elodie, a high school friend who was attending Arizona State University. She deferred during the fall semester so she stayed in St. Louis, like me.
Elodie had struggled with concussion problems as well and was one of the only people I felt truly understood me during that period of my life. One day we were walking her dog around the neighborhood when we stopped at a baseball field and she told me to sit down on the bench. She proceeded to give me a well-rehearsed pitch about how I should move to Arizona with her for the spring semester. All of my classes were online through the community college and most of hers were as well. We could find a cheap apartment in Tempe, do classes from the pool, and spend our weekends hiking and biking in the mountains.
I was immediately intrigued and for the first time in the year and a half I had struggled with the repercussions of a brain injury I felt like my heart was bursting open with possibilities instead of irregularly beating due to anxiety. When I got home that day, I told my mom to sit down on her bed, and gave her the same well-rehearsed presentation. She just looked at me.
“You really want to do this? Move to Arizona?”
I thought she was questioning whether Arizona was really the place I wanted to live.
“I mean it’s just one semester, I don’t know if I’ll stay there after that–” I started.
“I meant to say that this is the first time I’ve seen you talk about moving away with excitement in your eyes instead of dread ever since you got your concussion. Yes, you’re moving to Arizona.”
My dad immediately agreed. My parents met each other in Arizona, and before that my dad has lots of stories about living in his RV in the desert and riding his dirt bike around everyday after work.
Elodie’s parents invited mine over for dinner one night that week in hopes to convince my parents to let me move to Arizona.
“Convince us to let her go? She’s going! When do we sign the lease?” My dad joked. I signed my lease on October 31, 2020.
In Phoenix, I woke up every day in a place that did not know who I had been when I was sick. It did not know me at all and therefore had no expectations for me. With the clean slate I began to redefine myself, not by what I had lost during recovery, but by everything I was starting to gain.
Our apartment, located on East Lemon Street, was the perfect place for my new discovery. It was definitely nothing special. It came fully furnished and had two bedrooms, one bath, a living room, and kitchen. The shower generally went back and forth between only having hot water and only having cold water.
Even though the apartment wasn’t much, it was everything to me.
Our oddly large living room was big enough to store our bikes – my only form of transportation – and our Spikeball net which we played on the complex’s sand volleyball courts. There was a pool where I regularly studied for my classes from, and a small gym made out of a train car where I worked out every morning overlooking the pool.
When I wasn’t sitting at my desk doing online classes, I was either hiking, mountain biking, reading a Tempe Public Library Book at the only spot with grass and trees at Salt River Park, practicing racquetball, playing soccer on the ASU fields, swimming in the pool, or taking night drives around Tempe with Elodie in her car while listening to the same “Nights in Phoenix” playlist.
The Salt River was 2.1 miles away, mountain biking at Papago Park 4.8 miles, the Safeway for groceries 0.8 miles, the library 2 miles, and the racquetball courts 2.1 miles. Those were the holy spaces of my Phoenix universe, the places I spent all my time. While my bubble in Phoenix was limited to the places I could visit on my orange bike that always had dirt ingrained in the tires, it felt like my bubble was bursting.
While I was recovering, there were countless rigid stipulations put into my life. Some of them were from doctors, lots from my own physical limitations, and others from the anxious, hypervigilant version of myself that had emerged during that time. The rules were all meant to protect me but instead ended up making my world feel small, tense, and trapped.
In Phoenix I continued to heal and finally realized I was no longer at war with the war and could simply sit back and live in it instead. My brain was physically recovering from the concussion but my mind was also recovering from the survival-mode habits it had clung to for so long. In Phoenix, I regained a healthy relationship with my exercise, eating, and my body.
Once my online classes started I created another new rule for myself in regards to exercise. I had to do it every day. Which then creates a sort of continuous, healthy loop that has very simple science behind it even though the execution is anything but. When I exercise hard during the day, I sleep better at night, I wake up feeling more refreshed making it easier for me to exercise. Exercising was hard at first. While recovering, even just walking exacerbated my symptoms of dizziness, headaches, brain fog, and an erratic heartbeat but even though it hurt, it was essential to recovering fully.
Eating was hard for me as well. I was so used to feeling sick and nauseous and being full after eating just two bites of a meal. The exercise rule helped. When I exercised, I got hungry, and then I ate. The more days that passed in which food post-exercise did not make me sick, the more the fear started to chip away and I was able to expand my diet from plain pasta and rotisserie chicken to cooking meals I actually wanted to eat and meals that made me feel good. I tried new recipes and allowed myself to feel pleasure and nourishment at the same time.
The exercise rule was a cycle but not a trap. It was a gentle, mindless rhythm that allowed me to carry forward. Unlike the rigid systems I used to live by, this one was self-sustaining and kind.
I gained 10 pounds over the span of five months. I returned back to St. Louis almost unrecognizable. I left as a sickly kid and returned home as a healed one.
This past week I returned to Phoenix for the first time since I drove north out of the city in May of 2021. There are various memories that come to mind as I sit out in the dry heat or when I look down at my feet and see the dirt clinging to my calves and dying my white socks brown. They are fleeting but extremely vivid.
There is something beautiful and uneasy about coming back to a place you used to live. It’s comforting to revisit the places I once called home, but it also means coming to terms with all the people I used to be.
My orange bike still sits in my parents’ garage with dirt encrusted into the tires but I haven’t ridden it since I moved back home to St. Louis in May. I had a natural falling out with Elodie and we haven’t corresponded since August 2022. I often break the exercise cycle I created in Phoenix and always suffer the repercussions.
When I drove by the ASU campus and my old apartment on Wednesday I kept wondering what my life would be like if I transferred to ASU after community college and stayed in Phoenix instead of choosing the University of Tulsa. At the time, I felt as though staying at ASU was the “easy way out” or a “cop-out” because the city had become a place I associated with safety. I believed that if I didn’t uproot myself again, I was weak. Now four years later, I realize that was the complete opposite. Phoenix is so far from my home of St. Louis – in geography, culture, and way of life.
Part of the reason I avoided ASU was because I had not picked Phoenix out for myself. Elodie had pitched the idea and I moved with her. I have always been desperate to carve out a space in the world that felt entirely mine, not one I follow someone else into. I wanted proof that I could build a life on my own terms. But I think out of all the places I’ve lived, Phoenix felt the most like my spiritual home.
In times like these I am extremely hard on myself. I think, “I wish I could go back and do it all over again knowing what I know now.” But in reality, that little girl making the wrong decisions and living different lives is how I know the things that I do now. I may have grown up in the Midwest, gone to school in the south, and the east coast may be the biggest hub for my work industry, but somehow I get the feeling that spring semester wasn’t the last time I will live in Phoenix, Arizona.
Yours truly,
Calihan
A playlist of songs that evoke very vivid memories of biking down the Salt River:
This was lovely. Nobody understands the phrase "you can never go home" until they try it. I've revisited places I've previously lived before and it's nearly impossible to reconcile the modern version of those places with my memories of them. The best part about moving to a random city is we can become whoever we need to be when we get there. The second best part is, we can leave those ghosts behind when we leave. Thanks for sharing your story.
I have memories of places like this, thank you for a trip through yours! Taking a moment to celebrate how far you’ve come is so important and transporting yourself to another time when you were different makes it all more clear.