Going home

Leaving is always bitter sweet: the friends you know you might never see again, the places you love. As I made my way to Montreal, first in the shuttle, then the plane, I was a bit like this sky: sunny, but a bit cloudy.
On the one hand, New York has been, for the past 2 years, a wonderful experience: I met wonderful people, wrote a book, an impressive number of papers, discovered places that tourists never really see. New York made me more open, curious, and prone to actually go out and see things. My motto was: if it's there, and it's safe, let's go. Completely out of my comfort zone!
On the other hand, with the end of this time, came also the end of... well the postdoctoral fellow charmed life. Yes, I'll have this status a few more months, but I already know I have to find a job, sooner than later, and since I didn't get the professorships I applied for, there is a lot of unknown on that side of my life.

But I couldn't wait to go home: there's time to be spent with my grandmother, taking care of her (though, as I write this a lot later, that time was cut short by her death, the day after I came back to Montreal), taking care of my family, reconnecting with my friends, my city, my cat. The need, also, to feel a bit more settled, to leave the in-between nature of my life, ever since I finished my PhD.

And I'll come back to New York. I know that.