6 Flights, 3 Cities, and 1 Ridiculously Ambitious 50-State Goal

For a long time, I knew I wanted to go back to the US. I just didn’t know that I would decide to do it quite so suddenly. Michigan had been somewhere I wanted to visit at some point, but choosing to make the trip exactly when I did was honestly a pretty spontaneous decision. One moment it was an idea, and not too long after that, I had flights booked and was realizing, Oh. I’m actually doing this.

And then, a couple of days before I was supposed to leave, I got sick. Since I was traveling internationally and traveling alone, my brain did what anxious brains do best and immediately began imagining every possible thing that could go wrong. For a little while, I seriously considered canceling the entire trip.

Thankfully, I didn’t.

Part of what made the trip so special was knowing that I had a sweet friend waiting for me on the other side. My friend Paige hosted me, drove me around, welcomed me into her life for those few days, and did so many little and big things to make me feel cared for. There is something especially meaningful about being far away from home and having someone make a place feel safe and familiar for you. I’m very grateful for her.

And then there was Michigan itself. I really had not expected it to be so beautiful. Having lived in Georgia and traveled through places like North and South Carolina, I already knew how beautiful parts of the United States could be. But Michigan surprised me. There was something about the landscape, the water, the trees, the quiet roads, and the feeling of late summer that I loved much more than I expected. Maybe part of that feeling was simply because I had missed America.

A lot.

I had not been back to the U.S. for two years because I was fulfilling the two-year home residency requirement connected to my previous J-1 visa. Two years is not an eternity, of course. But it is long enough for a place you once called home to begin feeling almost like another lifetime. Coming back made me realize how strange the concept of “home” becomes after you have lived far away from the place you were born.

Albania is home. But America was home too, for a while. And when you leave one home to return to the other, I think something in your sense of place becomes a little fractured. Maybe alienated is the better word. Home is still home, but somehow it is not completely home anymore, because there are pieces of you somewhere else. There are streets thousands of miles away that feel familiar. Grocery stores you strangely miss. Churches, parks, neighborhoods, friends, ordinary routines, tiny memories tied to places that most people back home have never seen. And then you return to those places and realize that life there continued without you, too. It creates this strange split sense of belonging.

You are grateful to be where you are, while simultaneously missing somewhere else. You can love your home country deeply and still feel homesick for a country that was never technically your home to begin with. I’m not sure someone who has never lived between countries can completely understand what I mean. It is difficult to explain without sounding ungrateful for one place or overly sentimental about another. But I think once you have built a life somewhere far away, you never completely leave it behind. Parts of you remain scattered across places. Maybe that is not entirely a sad thing. Maybe it simply means your idea of home gets bigger.

This trip also added another place to a slightly ridiculous goal I have for myself: I would really love to visit every U.S. state one day. So far, I’ve been to Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Michigan, and Illinois. I’ve also spent time in Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, neither of which counts toward my fifty states, obviously, but they definitely count in my little mental map of America. Illinois actually happened almost by accident on this trip. I had a long layover in Chicago on my way home and decided that, instead of sitting inside the airport for hours, I might as well go see the city. So I did.

That is probably a pretty good summary of this entire trip.

Sometimes spontaneous decisions become some of the memories we are most grateful we didn’t talk ourselves out of.

Michigan, I’m very glad I came.

And now I have quite a few more states left to see.