In May of 2023, when my wife and I left California for North Carolina, I hoped Asheville would mirror all of my desires, like an AI chatbot of a city that told me everything I wanted to hear, liked the same things as me, and drank the same beer as me. After eight desperate years in medicine, I needed and deserved that much.
Asheville, though, was content being who it was—artsy, neurotic, progressive, transient, gorgeous—and didn’t give a shit about my wants. In the absence of my perfectly attuned city, I led an internal rebellion and adopted a Larry David stance toward life experience. Lots of complaining, minimal ownership, stray comments to Keti about how cool it would be to live in Charleston. One spring Saturday morning about a year after we’d arrived, as the azaleas and daffodils bloomed all around us, I grumbled to Keti about Asheville’s infrastructure. Traffic, potholes, construction. I can’t remember specifics but I said something about something that every city in the world deals with. She was done: “Here you go again. Can we just have one moment where we enjoy where we live?”
Shit, I thought, I’m becoming the guy who doesn’t like anything.
For the previous decade, I’d relied on the delusion of change—Great Plains to Orange County, Orange County to Central Coast, Central Coast to Blue Ridge Mountains— and with some success. Moving has merits. You try new things, meet new people, discover new parts of yourself. But when the new wore off and revealed the deeper questions—Who am I? What do I actually want?—and I wasn’t ready to answer those questions, I projected my fear onto where I lived. The most destructive habit I ever picked up.
What if I stop trying to change this place?” I wondered during an afternoon walk through our neighborhood, circa summer 2024. What if I let myself just be… here?
I stopped talking about Charleston and started talking to our neighbors. I got an incredible co-worker and lost a legendary one. I committed to my furniture business. I joined a beer group where the guys didn’t always like the beers I drank. Keti and I explored every corner of western Carolina. We became first-name-basis regulars at our favorite coffee shop.
When September 27th, 2024 arrived, we were given the privilege to endure Hurricane Helene with our community, and I grasped that there was nowhere else on earth I’d rather live.
“To appreciate a place fully a man must know that he can live there,” writes Matthew McConaughey in Greenlights. “When all his discomforts disappear and he lets himself be owned by the place, he needs to customize and localize himself to the place he visits, to the degree that he knows that he could live there forever, then and only then is it acceptable for him to leave.”
A few months back, around our two-year mark, I realized I could live in Asheville forever, and that Asheville, prevailing in penultimate victory over my first impressions, would live inside me forever. Also, a few months back, Keti and I realized we wanted something else too: to be in Oklahoma again. This understanding came on slowly, not in a flash like our previous cross-country fantasies, but more like the emergence of a sprout from a seed planted many seasons ago.
In ten days, I’ll say farewell and trust its acceptable to leave this place. And I will miss everything about it and its wonderful people, never forgetting what Asheville gave me:
A chance to be at home no matter where I live.
To livin’ a life we love,
Ryan Fightmaster, MD
