Tonight, I’m at Amélie’s in Charlotte: a 24-hour bakery / coffee shop nestled just beyond the bustle of uptown — up, never down. The Queen City’s lights sparkle in the stormy sky.
I make it a point to return to Amélie’s every time Charlotte beckons me back — which isn’t often, despite being just two hours away. It’s complicated. We have a history, she and I.
When I do come back and visit, I can’t leave town without at least one macaroon from a line of red and orange and yellow and brown and green and purple ones in the window. Better to get one of each.
I’m sitting in an atrium beside the bakery typing up a late-night blog post because I swore I’d write one every Monday I’m not flying to some corner of this globe on my #YearOfFlights. The atrium is loud and echoey and full of obnoxious kids scraping the metal chair legs against the linoleum floor, but the bakery itself with a hundred seating options and friends scattered about is approximately fifteen degrees cooler inside. Frigid.
SCRAPE.
And so I wince with the scrapes as I realize this moment, this location, this night perfectly capture my year of living in this city: a long, sharp scrape mere footsteps and maybe a cardigan away from communal bliss.
I moved to Charlotte in 2015 hopeful though worn after a 282-day road trip around North America. I joined a church and a small group and took a tutoring job and a wilderness job that forced me out of town every other week before I couldn’t take it anymore.
It — all of it. Jobs. Groceries. Laundry. Rent. Integration. Stuffing my wandering soul into a city of financial centers and Elevation Church Christians and zero mountains.
I entered Charlotte with gargantuan hopes. Hopes that wherever I landed after #RunningTo would be the city I’d call home the rest of my life. A city of dreams fulfilled that simultaneously kept adding new ones.
Instead, I realized that calling anywhere home is momentous, arduous. Home requires a lot of work. A lot of time. A lot of presence. A lot of fierce persistence.
Quite simply, I did not put in the work Charlotte required of me. I took a job that stole me away 50% of the time, leaving me at least 50% mentally absent even while present. Left dreaming of new horizons and encounters, a grittier city with mountains.
I moved to Asheville after a year here, and in many ways I found my dreams coming true. A fulfilling job, gorgeous scenery in all seasons, friends coming to visit me, even moving there.
And then again the realization that, indeed, home takes work. Even if it comes pre-packaged with the prettiest blue mountains this side of anywhere.
SCRAPE.
I stare at this Queen City skyline with kind of a hopeless sigh. I failed this place. Failed the Tom who once hoped for things when he decided to end an epic life on the road and start a new chapter here — supposedly the last chapter he’d ever write.
And yet I look back on my year as a Charlottean as perhaps the most pivotal year of my existence. That in my descent from the mountaintop, in my angst and discontent, in my search and desperation for something, anything remotely as passionate as a cross-continental road trip, I messaged some friends about a summer retreat.
I’d met these friends on the Internet and in my year-long travels. Some had met one another, most had not, and I had a feeling all would hit it off if we could assemble in the same room, the same house for a few hours, a few days.
They became friends who indeed hit it off. Friends who suggested a new story that summer. Friends who, by autumn, would cofound a new web community alongside me for fellow believers also wrestling with issues of sexuality and masculinity.
Your Other Brothers was born that fall, and it was born out of Charlotte. A community birthed of brotherhood and desperation and unrealized dreams. A swinging lantern for the hopeless and searching as we’d once found for ourselves many years prior.
When I think of Charlotte, I can’t help thinking of wasted time and boundless dreams that never crossed to the conscious world. I think of a home that never finished the walls or carpeting.
But I also think of YOB. Of the community that has changed stories the world over because a dozen dudes from the Internet once ventured to a weekend retreat.
For all the winces Charlotte gives me, I also can’t escape the seeds planted here. Can’t forget them the rest of my days, the rest of my wanderings, the rest of my searchings for blue mountains, literal or metaphoric.
It’s a city of beautiful buildings, new and old. A city of uptown, never downtown.
A city of 24-hour bakeries and colorful macaroons and awful chair scrapes.
A city of broken dreams. And unexpected ones.
A city waiting for you to awaken, because the time for dreaming is over.
It’s time to live.
I only have one question. What is an Elevation Church Christian? Are they different from the rest of us? Aside from breathing the rarefied air of Charlotte, are they more righteous than the rest of us? Just wondering.