Guilt
I admit that I feel guilty for coming here. Everyone I know is back home
suffering in various ways, and I'm here having the time of my life. I have
more than one friend who I believe is angry at me and feels betrayed by
my departure. I'm not sure, they haven't said so, but many of those friends
simply don't communicate with me anymore, or if they do they are angry in
other ways, such as being snappish online.

Not that I'm going go change anything. Coming here was very expensive, and
these relationships are part of that expense. I'm sad, I'm guilty, but I'm
not wrong. 

Part of my determination is due to how my upbringing made me feel about 
relationships. We moved when I was (1), 8, and 12, and then I moved out
at 17, and moved back in at 19 for a year. Every time I did that (except 
when I was 1, hence the parentheses) I lost relationships.

When we moved at 8 I lost ALL my friends, and only found the Danays again
when 25 years later. The Danays lived across the street from our house in
Queens, three sisters who were my friends. Then we lived in New Jersey for
four years and moved to Minnesota, and I lost all THOSE friends.

Back then we had a thing called "long distance," and it was a literal price
you paid to call someone farther away than within your own state. During the
year that I moved back home after my first disastrous year in college, I got
homesick for my friends back in New Jersey. I managed to find the number of
a teacher. This guy was a theater major who needed a job, so he taught 
social studies in our school. But the way he taught social studies was to
have us put on "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller in fourth grade. I mean, 
it's got history, right? 

So I found his number somehow and talked to him. He reminded me that we 
had an old church pew  (why? Who knows) and when we moved he got the 
pew and it was now a bench on his porch. It was nice catching up and he
was gratified to learn I'd continued in theater during high school.
I hadn't spoken to him for, oh, 9 years at that point, so it was nice.

A month lather my father showed up at my door, red in the face and losing
his shit. It appeared that my call to my old teachier had cost (gasp!)
about a dollar fifty. For me getting shouted at by my father had always
been what is today called "triggering." My parents' style of parenting was
bullying - yelling and slapping you if you so much as had an expression on
your face that they didn't like. "I'll slap that look off your face!"

But this time, it was ridiculous. I had that money literally in my pocket.
Oh but my father would not be soothed - I had MADE A LONG DISTANCE CALL!
Why did I want to talk to those people? Why did I care about the past!?
Before my eyes my father transformed from the raging pedestal-figure who
raised me, to an absurd little man throwing a tantrum. 

He never regained his old place on the pedestal.

But that ethos of "Don't look back, don't make long-distance phone calls,
put those old relationships behinnd you" was already in me. And so when
I got divorced and moved to Arizona, a lot of those relationships started
to change. As much as I wanted to keep my friends, I could tell that they
didn't actually care that much whether I was around or not. In other words,
I was gone and their lives went on. Which, fair enough, right?

So to get back to the main point, by the time it came time to leave for
Portugal, most of those relationships were already pretty tenuous. 

But then people got sick. My mother turned 90, my friend Keith got brain
cancer, recently the fellow who directed our comedy company was diagnosed
with terminal thyroid cancer and given months to live. And all of my old
friends, healthy or not, are living in a violent fascist dictatorship, 
worrying about gunshots and ICE agents and watching America get dismantled
before their eyes, whether they believe it or not. 

So... I feel guilty about leaving everyone behind. It's stupid. I can't DO
anything. I can't help with people who have cancer, I can't save people
from fascism. About the best thing I CAN do is open the Exit Door and 
show them by example that they CAN get out if they're determined enough.

I miss my kids, but my kids don't miss me - they're in their thirties,
they're living their lives, and I haven't even been gone yet as long as
I disappeared to Arizona. That's as it should be. When I was in town 
waiting to leave for Portugal, three months, it was all I could do to get
together with anyone, my kids, my friends, whoever. Everyone is getting on
with their lives. And that's as it should be. 

I just have to keep telling myself it's okay for me to be here, that
everyone back home is doing as well as they would be were I still there.

But I still feel guilty. I think it's from being raised Catholic.