Seeking Something Missing

Written by Emma Kresge

I have never watched a Wes Anderson movie without my dad. When The French Dispatch came out, we made a bowl of microwave popcorn (a quarter of which would be thrown to the dog) and sat in our usual spots on the couch. Anderson’s film strung together stories inspired by the New Yorker and some of its writers, and as a 16-year-old with a bedroom wall plastered with those magazine covers, I was captivated.

I was in my junior year of high school, and the prevailing thought in my head was getting the fuck out of Buffalo, New York, and booking it straight to some gleaming metropolis for college. A sort of resentment had grown in my chest as I began to feel that my hometown was preventing me from becoming the person I wanted to be. I would sit in math class and obsessively daydream about life in the city. I’m not religious, but sometimes I’d pray to end up in Boston.

The last story of The French Dispatch follows Roebuck Wright, an American food journalist working in Paris who gets caught in a gang war while reporting on renowned chef Lieutenant Nescaffier. In a scene that has stayed with me since the moment I watched it, Wright (who is based on James Baldwin), visits Nescaffier in the hospital after the chef had eaten poisoned food. They have a conversation about their experiences as expatriates in Paris and their relationships with home.

“I’m a foreigner, you know,” Nescaffier whispers to Wright from his hospital bed.

“This city’s full of us, isn’t it? I’m one myself.”

“Seeking something missing, missing something left behind.”

“Maybe, with good luck, we’ll find what eluded us in the places we once called home.”

When I arrived in Boston last year, I was seeking something missing and I was finding it everywhere. I found it in my friends down the dorm hallway, in shitty Allston basements, in having my name in print, in the screeching of the Green Line. Excitement, fulfillment, and purpose had eluded me in Buffalo. I started to find it in Boston.

Reveling in the life I had dreamed of kept me from being homesick for more than a week. The resentment I had built up for Buffalo made it easy to forget about. I was glad to leave my hometown in the dust. Good riddance to the perennial exhaustion and boredom I felt in high school, and the near terror at the thought that I’d be stuck in that feeling forever.

But I don’t think we can ever really hate where we grew up, no matter what the “angsty teenager trapped in suburbia” inside of us says. The naivety of your judgment keeps you from seeing the love your hometown is waiting to give you. I went home for the summer this year. I worked my 4th season at a local ice cream shop. I finally grieved the death of my dog. I laughed with my mom while she cooked. The adolescent resentment I held onto for so long dissipated in the warm sun on the beaches of Lake Erie. As summertime closed and I packed back up for Boston, my heart didn’t beat with the same eagerness it had a year before. I loved school, but the permanence of moving on finally hit me. I realized I would be packing up and leaving Buffalo over and over again for the rest of my life. A piece of my heart was always going to be stowed away until Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or a few weeks in July.

The sadness I felt at returning to Boston this year was healed quickly as I got back into the swing of things. But in the spare moments where I would once daydream about being a glamorous twenty-something city girl, I find myself thinking about watching Wes Anderson with my dad and throwing popcorn to the dog. I miss what I left behind.

Part of me wants to go home and watch my sister cheer at football games, eat my mom’s baked ziti, and never leave my childhood bedroom. The other part of me knows that although I’ve forgiven my hometown, I was right about needing to go—to grow—somewhere else. My heart often feels heavy with nostalgia, but I feel more fulfilled right now than I ever have. I’m happy with who I’m becoming and I have empathy for who I’ve been. So while I’ve accepted that I’ll have to keep leaving Buffalo, that only means I get to keep coming back.