The following is a very strange announcement at a very strange time, in a very strange (and possibly too elaborate) format.

We’re moving.

Let me start by addressing a few FAQs upfront:

Do you know there is currently a global pandemic happening? Yes.

Where are you moving? New York City.

Wait, what? Yes.

Do you have an apartment? Yes.

Is Eduardo coming with you? Obviously.

Will your plants be coming with you? No. (This is not a FAQ but is a fact I feel slightly bitter about.)

We’ve collectively lived in California for an average of 4.5 years, and as of today, we will only be residents for one more week. Those years kind of feel like these first 4.5 weeks of quarantine. The beginning feels so far away and there was a solid stretch of time where I spent an absurd amount of time on FaceTime. But in the first scenario, it was because I had no friends here and wanted a social life. Now I have friends here, and still want a social life.

Here is a very professional graph that I spent too much time on, which depicts the relationship between my time in California and my feelings about my time in California (on a scale from 1 to 10).

There was a LOT of deliberation that went into determining those rankings (a full 8 minutes). They’re mostly arbitrary with little to no data to back them up, but during the Big Dip of 2017, I did journal* this: “Amy Poehler reminds us in [the movie] Sisters that ‘Home isn't a building, it's a feeling.’ Good thing Matt feels like home because this place doesn't.”

*The term “journal” is used extremely loosely, since I do not actually, by definition, journal. I tell myself I do when I whip out a notebook three times a year to write something that I feel is profound but is actually not, and then I use the word “journal” when I want to sound like a really do have my shit together. That is a fact. People who journal have their shit together. Do not quote me on that.

Most of the not-so-great things you’ve either read about previously, or if you haven’t, can read here. I do, however, feel like I’ve not given enough credit to the infinite number of positive things that have made living here an absolute dream, so I will give a brief synopsis in the form of a list:

The people

Every single time you see that slope increase, it is because tremendously special people entered my life as strangers and became my brothers, my sisters, my family. Our church, and our small group—all iterations of it. My Hackbright Academy classmates, and my improv school classmates. My acquaintances and friends-of-friends who became my own close friends. My triathlon friends, and my Funding Circle coworkers. I love all of these people so, so much. In my typical writing form, I would love to write a joke here, but at this exact moment, I can’t. My eyes have been hitting the gym a lot lately and they’re a little sweaty right now.

We came to California with the mindset that whether it was one year, or five years, or fifty years, we’d ride it out as long as it felt right, but I think I kind of always knew in my heart that this wasn’t for forever. I would talk myself into thinking it was, but then well-intentioned friends would ask, “Do you think you and Matt want to have kids?” and I sometimes fought the urge to quickly say, “Not while we’re here.” There were many not-sometimes where I would just flat out say it, but I was always cautious, because I wanted to be honest, but I also didn’t want those who have become like family to us here to feel like they are not family enough. You, yes you, reading this – you will always be family enough.

I’m not entirely sure where that urge came from. I think it has something to do with the fact that I really enjoy the adult relationship that I’m developing with my parents. I know I’m fortunate to be able to say that. It’s fun to realize that the imaginary wall that prevented you from dropping a curse word in front of them or talking about real life things like feelings or work or sex can dissolve if you want it to. Also, Matt and I like to work a lot and want free childca – I mean…happy grandparents (in the future, NOT now).

When it became more evident that “the move” was coming, I decided that I was going to become a Yes Woman. Regular Megan is pretty strict about going to bed semi-early and not drinking too much and basically just says “no” to probably too many things because she’s afraid of messing with the balancing act that is her stupid attempt at a well-rounded life. Regular Megan was lame in college and didn’t realize it until too late. But Yes Megan? She says Yes. She says yes to times of night she hasn’t seen in a while, yes to another glass of wine, yes to weird art exhibits that Regular Megan would never go to.

Yes Megan is another stranger that came into my life and became like family. Life is more fun with her in it, and I wish I would have met her sooner.

During a conversation with my friend, Arpita, about moving, she talked about how she also didn’t really plan on being here forever, but that it was important for her to leave here on good terms. Like any relationship, you don’t want to end in a fight or storm out because you didn’t get what you wanted. I didn’t realize until she said it that that was something I was striving for too. I wanted life here to be so good that it would feel difficult to leave, and selfishly, I wanted it to feel difficult for others for us to leave. I wanted to have fond memories and a desire to come back often. I’ve always said that I would know it was ok to leave when I had made it through The Four Stages:

The times when I didn’t want to leave
The times when I wanted to leave but it felt like it wouldn’t matter because nobody here would care if I left
The times I wanted to leave and also didn’t want to because I would really miss the friends I had here, but they might not miss me
The times I wanted to leave and would really miss the friends I had here, but knew they would miss me too

It was really important to me that our time here was worth something and also that I wasn’t the same person I was when I came here. At this moment, I feel like both of those are true. For example, I used to dislike anything cherry-flavored, and also cherries. Now, I like anything cherry-flavored, and still do not like cherries.

You might have noticed that my Instagram has basically become a coronavirus/quarantine meme account, but one of my definite favorites is this one:

Well, damn. This is so aggravatingly true. I cannot express how true this is to me, in my life, right now. I absolutely felt on the verge of having my life together. Incredible friends, a budding comedy career (questionable), a job I love, all the fun activities that Yes Megan was saying yes to, an exciting move to NYC. I was even making more attempts at journaling. And then, BAM. The corona came.

April triathlon with Demetra: cancelled.

Book of Mormon with Alex and Michelle: cancelled.

Friends’ birthdays and housewarmings: cancelled.

Wine party: cancelled.

Performing in the Orange County Improv Festival: cancelled.

Disneyland: cancelled.

More time with friends and coworkers: cancelled.

Maybe the ultimate demise of cancel culture is these coronavirus times. You don’t have to be special or do something stupid to get cancelled. It doesn’t matter anymore because everything is cancelled. Just as Yes Megan arrived, corona did too.

I sat down to make a list of things I absolutely wanted to do here before leaving (that weren’t already planned), and to be very honest, I could only come up with two things, both of which I was able to do:

Go to Alcatraz (in retrospect it seems very lucky that we were on a ferry and a small island with hundreds of people two weeks before everything shut down and did not get sick)
Eat at my favorite Bay Area restaurant, Rick & Ann’s (I will for sure be back)

Then there is a category of things I didn’t really even have a chance to add to my list before realizing they just weren’t going to happen: the lasts. The last day in my office chair, the last small group Tuesday, the last Sunday at church, the last workout at my gym, the last coffee date at Equator, the last Salmon Teriyaki plate from Proper Food (except this one no longer matters because I have since learned that Proper Foods is in NYC!!!). We had just started planning our goodbye party when everything got shut down.

It’s personally kind of a relief to know that we don’t have to do those things. For the time being, we still get to participate in our small group, we still get to attend our church, we still get to see our friends just as much (if not more?) than we’d see them if we lived in California. I even get to keep my coworkers – luckily, that part is true even when quarantine ends. This makes it all feel a little fake and has made leaving semi-difficult to process. I feel like there will be a day 6-8 months from now that I remember this and feel sad about the lasts we didn’t get, but for now, I’m grateful to skip that part.

It’s also kind of scary to think about the fact that the next trips we have planned to come back (a few times later this summer and fall) might not even happen as scheduled. We spent a long time thinking about moving before actually taking the chance, and I, for one, did not for a single second think, “I wonder if we will move during a global pandemic that is going to last who knows how long?” I’ll remember to add that to my checklist for the next time.

Despite all of this, the timing still felt just right. Long story short (a real time-saver, since the rest of this is also very short), it became evident that if Matt chose to move to a team in New York, the chances were good that I would be able to keep my job too. I think that phrase “the stars were aligning” is kind of dumb so instead I will say, things happened, and things worked out. I will now take a moment to re-emphasize that I truly did feel like I was on the verge of having my shit together. Also, to be completely frank, Matt’s company considers this a “business necessary” relocation and is paying for all of it. Tell me that if you were going to make money by moving closer to your family (whom you do indeed like), that you wouldn’t do it.

As an added incentive and an overall 2% of the reason why we are moving, I am over the weather here. I just need to say it. We get an insane amount of flack for it, but I miss winter (don’t @ me, I know NYC snow is gross and I know that it’s freezing because that’s literally what winter is). For my 23rd birthday, I actually asked Matt, “if I take a Benadryl and just fall asleep in the car, will you sneak into the car and drive to Tahoe overnight so I can wake up to snow?” I told my own husband I would drug myself and then asked him to kidnap me. He didn’t do it.

I also knew the timing was right because Ellen DeGeneres said so. A few weeks after moving here, we went to Target, and I saw that they had Finding Dory Kleenex boxes on sale for $0.70 each. Apparently, Finding Dory’s time in the theaters was up and they didn’t think that people would want to continue buying plain white tissues if they were in Finding Dory tissue boxes. I decided to purchase every single Finding Dory box on the shelf and then didn’t buy a single box of tissues the whole time we’ve lived in California. We have a few left in one box that currently sits on our kitchen counter, and the first box of tissues we open in our new home will be the last of my Finding Dory tissues. As Dory says, “I know how we can get to the locomotion.” And the lesser known, but perhaps more applicable, “The best things happen by chance.”

This is us seeing Finding Dory in THeaters in July 2016.

Now, you might be wondering why we’ve waited this long to formally announce this.

First, we had for many months been planning what could have been one of the biggest and best surprises I have ever pulled off. It was going to be epic and of all the things being cancelled, one of the things I was most disappointed about was this.

We flew to NYC mid-March (a previously planned time) to look for apartments for one day. Things were not great, but this was just before everything really imploded and after a lot of agonizing thought, we decided to go. We sanitized everything, were two of about twelve people on our full-sized plane, and then spent 6 hours seeing apartments. At this point, coronavirus in NYC was mostly people going about their lives and talking about how odd it was that we couldn’t shake hands. The trip ended up being 48 hours door-to-door, and we were back just before SF shut down. We signed a lease two days after, and two days after that, is when NYC really started to fall apart. I’m not entirely sure how we avoided getting sick as a result of that trip, other than being psychotic about using hand sanitizer and basically refusing to touch anything we didn’t have to. Also we ordered room service “to avoid going out” (not at all because I really wanted to just sit in our nice robes eating room service).

In The Original Plan, we would have gone to NYC, not been concerned in the slightest about a globally-destructive pandemic, taken a train down to Philadelphia, surprised my parents, and then gone to Lancaster to surprise Matt’s parents. My brother had even helped me plot and came up with idea for how to unsuspiciously get my parents in Philadelphia. This is the one glimmer of light in The Surprise That Did Not Happen. [Insert more extravagant details that I will not be sharing here in case they can be upcycled for any future surprise that actually happens.]

The surprise undeniably did not go as planned, but 1) nothing in 2020 has thus far and 2) I still don’t regret telling my parents almost last (sorry, Mom!). I live for surprising other people and also I knew that if we had told them any sooner it would have just been months of a million questions – I wanted answers to all of them before she even had time to ask. We ended up FaceTiming from our hotel room in New York and it was enormously anticlimactic. The end.

The second reason is simply that, like everything else, it feels like a weird time. There are more important things happening and the people who needed to know, knew.

Moving also means giving a lot of stuff away, so we’ve been maintaining a Google spreadsheet with things that we don’t want to throw away but definitely don’t want, and spent the last few Saturday mornings like Santa playing ding-dong ditch. We drop something on the porch or on the sidewalk or in the mailbox, ring the doorbell, and run. We do not know who lives in these houses (just kidding). We say hello from far away and sometimes through masks, go through the now-standard corona small talk about how weird this all is and how long this will last, as if that will somehow make this end sooner, and then get back in the car and sanitize our hands.

For this weekend’s last big drop off (guess we got one good “last” in there, hey?), we drove out to Baker Beach to drop all of my baking ingredients off with my friend Amanda, and then Matt and I took a really nice walk in the woods behind her apartment. On the way to the rest of the drop-offs in Oakland, I made a wrong turn and instead of going back the way we came, we ended up making a giant Loop de Bay, first taking the Bay Bridge, then the Golden Gate Bridge, and then the Richmond Bridge. After the initial flurry of me not understanding the GPS and Matt not being happy about me not understanding the GPS and the GPS being confused about why it was being called an “idiot,” it was beautiful and bittersweet. My favorite part of the Santa ding-dong ditch situation has been taking people’s photos from a socially appropriate distance. I wish I could just hug them.

Also, while I am sad about leaving my plants and my unnecessarily vast array of types of flours behind, I would like to thank Demetra and Amanda, respectively, for adopting them from me. I hope the plants live a long time and I hope the flour…doesn’t? Whatever. I just mean I hope it turns into something tasty and someone eats it.

We love you, California. You will always feel a little bit like home.

Stay inside, and we’ll see you again very soon.