moved to Texas when I was three years old. I figured that, surely, it was a mix-up. Even as a kid I didn't think I belonged in the Lone Star State, with its snakeskin boots and honky tonks. Wasn’t I meant to be up north somewhere, frolicking in the Atlantic Ocean, shoveling snow, staying up till 11pm to watch prime time television? But my parents decided to leave our home in Pennsylvania, which is how I wound up stranded in Big D, set adrift amongst a million urban cowboys and bottled blondes. Boy, I couldn’t wait for college.

In college, I would leave Texas and return to the loving embrace of the North, from which I was so cruelly ripped as a young girl. The North, I figured, would be worlds different from the conservative, hunting-and-fishing monotony I’d grown so weary of down South. People would be liberal, and kind to animals, and open to dating short, curvy writer types. It would be brilliant. How it was always meant to be.

There was one problem: I didn’t get in. Well, I didn’t apply to any college outside Texas save one, and I got rejected. And the school was about as Northern as a mint julep—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But what I can I say? In my mind, the “North” began at, say, Oklahoma.

So I went to school in Austin, where I grew to love the state for all its eccentrics and grandiosity. For its originality and its wealth of Tex-Mex. I swore up and down I’d never stay in the state after graduation, but I did. And when my friends moved to San Francisco or Washington DC, I sent them reminders of the place they came from—a license plate that read “Cowgirl,” a pink cowboy hat, the shit I used to make fun when I saw it in people’s houses.

And though I swore up and down I’d never stay in Texas after graduation, I did. And though I swore up and down I’d never move back to Dallas, I did. And though I have done a fair amount of traveling in my time, I have managed to turn 30 years old knowing no other home but this state, with its flat, parched highways and the phone lines that sag into the distance. With its miserable weather, its Dan Rather patois, its love for big tits and chewing tobacco. I have learned to live by its rhythm—the bitter, snowless winters, the azaleas in the springtime, the summer heat we wear like a wrinkled suit, the quiet, muted fall evenings. My home state. Well, my home.

Until now, that is. I’ve been joking for the last few weeks that when I finally reached the Arkansas border, I would burst into tears. It wasn’t a joke, really, just another way to slip my worries underneath the door while no one was looking. I didn't know what kind of lonely might set in once I'd gone. I had wanted to leave for so long, talked about doing it for so long that actually doing it seemed... unfathomable. Overwhelming. What's the word I'm looking for? Sad.

When I got to the Arkansas border, though, I didn’t cry. I didn't even come close to crying. As I finally left Texas, I smiled--and waved goodbye.