After one last, properly committed bowl of naengmyeon in New Jersey, I moved to Michigan.

Michigan is, above all, quiet. Clean, orderly, spacious, and almost suspiciously calm. The roads are broad, the air feels less crowded, and everything appears to have been given a little more room than strictly necessary. My room, naturally, is the dirtiest place in the state.

Once I arrived, I started running into people I already knew from the previous project. They were familiar faces from an earlier version of my life here, back when I had been working on the other side of the relationship, so there was something unexpectedly satisfying about returning with a different company badge. A few people congratulated me when the new badge finally came through and told me good luck, which was such a small thing and still made me disproportionately happy. Same site, some of the same people, different badge. Apparently entire chapters of life can change while the buildings remain exactly where they were.

The company put us through about two days of orientation, though apparently it used to be a full week. Two days already contained presentations, policies, activities, and, for reasons I still don’t entirely understand, brain games. A week of being professionally oriented sounds less like onboarding and more like a controlled study in how long adults can remain seated while pretending to retain information. Two days was quite enough.

What amused me more was how different the company felt from the inside. When I had dealt with them as a customer, I was always slightly nervous. They seemed serious, intimidating, and vaguely capable of asking a question for which I should already have prepared. Once I joined, however, I discovered a surprisingly easygoing little community. It turns out large corporations are often frightening from across the conference table and mostly full of ordinary people once you get inside.

The site itself had changed too. Many of the vendor people I had worked alongside during the earlier project were gone or replaced, and the place felt noticeably quieter. When I first came here, everything was still being built and the site had that temporary-city feeling—contractors, vendors, construction, equipment, people constantly arriving and leaving. Now that the major build-out phase had passed, the crowd had thinned. Same place, different season. I suppose that was true of me too.

For housing, I went back to the same landlords I had stayed with during the earlier project because I had liked them and, in matters of housing, familiarity is often more valuable than architectural ambition. This time I’m in a two-bedroom, two-bath condo with a white lady roommate who is, for lack of a more diplomatic description, a little unusual. She is extremely particular about several things I had previously not realised were available to be particular about. Every so often I find myself thinking, Ah. So this is important to you. Still, I have decided she is probably a good person. A little peculiar, yes, but good. This is the working theory and, for domestic peace, a useful one.

Most of my transportation is handled by my electric scooter, my little scooter, which has quietly become the central infrastructure of my Michigan life. Meijer is about five minutes away, and work is roughly thirty minutes by scooter, which led me to wonder whether I really needed a car at all. Why spend thousands of dollars when I already possess two wheels, a charger, and an unreasonable amount of confidence?

The only drawback is that coworkers occasionally spot me in transit. Later someone will casually say, “I saw you on your scooter,” and I have to confront the fact that people from work have witnessed me outside my natural office habitat, leaning slightly forward and gliding down the road with considerably less dignity than I imagine myself to possess. There are now sightings. Reports. Possibly a pattern.

Americans also like to initiate small talk at inconvenient moments. One man cheerfully called out, “Hello, my two-wheeled friend!” while I was riding past, which was very kind and also precisely the sort of interaction I was trying to avoid. The scooter therefore serves two purposes: transportation and, when necessary, rapid social withdrawal.

Michigan is at least an excellent place for it. Compared with New Jersey, the roads here are much less determined to kill me. There are fewer broken patches of concrete, fewer mysterious holes, fewer moments when the pavement appears to have simply resigned. New Jersey roads occasionally felt like infrastructure with personal grievances. Michigan has so far been more civil.

Another thing I learned quickly is that the company is basically the largest K-Town in the area. This has had a surprisingly positive effect on my attendance enthusiasm because I am now genuinely excited about lunch. I find myself wondering what we’re eating before I have properly considered what work I need to do that day. Ordinary weekday lunches are sometimes better than formal team dinners, which is an organisational achievement I fully support.

I also discovered that the café coupons from the New Jersey office work in Michigan.

Corporate integration at its finest.

One company. Multiple states. One caffeine economy.

Work itself began in the usual way new jobs begin: with too much information, unclear ownership, unfamiliar systems, unexplained acronyms, and the distinct sensation of having been dropped into the middle of a film twenty minutes after it started. There was the usual period of looking around thinking, Who does this? Why are we doing it this way? Has everyone else been told something I haven’t? Then, slowly, the pieces started connecting, and once they did, everything became very busy very quickly.

And I like it.

That is probably the part that still surprises me most. Every now and then, in the middle of an ordinary day, I realise that this is more or less the life I had wanted. I wanted to move here. I wanted work that moved quickly and gave me things to solve. I wanted quieter surroundings and a daily routine that felt more self-contained. Somehow all of those vague intentions eventually turned into something very mundane: wake up, go to work, ride the scooter, eat lunch, come home.

There is no dramatic sense of arrival. My room is still messy. My roommate continues to introduce me to new categories of household concern. I still occasionally have no idea what is going on at work. I commute like a local cryptid. Nothing has clicked into some final, elegant arrangement.

But I think that may be what I like about it.

For a long time, this life existed mostly in conditional language: maybe I should move, maybe I could change jobs, maybe Michigan would suit me, maybe a quieter routine would feel better. Now there’s no maybe attached to most of it. It’s just Tuesday.

There’s something deeply satisfying about that. A life stops being an idea and becomes boring in the best possible way. Groceries have a route. Work has familiar faces. The commute has landmarks. You know where to get lunch. Your coffee coupon works. Someone at the office has seen you speeding past on a scooter and will presumably continue to see you doing so.

Maybe that is what settling down actually looks like—not a single decision followed by instant certainty, but the slow accumulation of ordinary things until they stop feeling temporary.

Of course, there will be difficult periods. There always are. Future me will almost certainly have complaints; she has historically been very dependable in that regard. But when things become frustrating, I want to remember this particular version of the beginning: seeing familiar people again, getting the badge, hearing people tell me good luck, riding down unusually peaceful roads, being excited about lunch, and being busy with work I had deliberately chosen.

At the start, my expectations were actually very simple. Learn what I can. Fix things one by one. Don’t panic unnecessarily. Keep going.

That still seems reasonable.

So am I settled in Michigan?

Maybe.

I’m not entirely sure what qualifies.

But my groceries are nearby, people at work know my face, my route to the office is familiar, and coworkers are beginning to recognise me by my preferred method of transport.

At some point, without much ceremony, that probably becomes living somewhere.

Good enough for me.

Michigan life, officially underway.

Fighting~~~!