going home

This weekend, after seven long years of East Coast residence, I saw the Rockies again.

My heart started to beat faster as I stepped off the plane into DIA, and looked out to the west at the Front Range. My eyes welled up with tears.
Later in the day I sat atop one of the foothills near the Nelson's house, on a picturesque park bench and looked out at Dinosaur Ridge, Green Mountain, Red Rocks and C-470. I found myself staring at the dry, brittle, straw-like grass. The vibrant yucca and other cacti, flourishing away in the winter, and the chico brush that looked as though it surely must be dead. But it's looked that way for at least seven years. Staring at these things made my heart feel funny.
Even the ground is different. This is the same ground. In the same place where I left it. And I had forgotten all about it.
I flashed back to the house I grew up in. The "back forty" I was ever escaping to.

I focused in on the desert ground with my viewfinder and snapped foolish pictures. I couldn't help it!
As I stepped back into the car with Shawn and Amy, after rushing across the street to snap pictures of a small herd of deer I sighed, "God I'm such a tourist now."
It was all novel now. It was no longer "just" home.

Amy is still the same. Still sweet and funny, smart and loving. More and more the embodiment of her mother. She still calls me Abs or Abigailwilson (in contrast to her father's favorites, Abbycita and Abbers).
She and Shawn still act (or perhaps more than ever act) as though they've been together for two months. The kisses and cooing pet names, the baby-talk voices and lap-sitting. They're madly, beautiful, disgustingly in love. It makes me nauseous... and tearful with happiness.
Next week is their ten year anniversary.

When they talk about the things they've been through together - her year in Paris, his in Wyoming, and their horrible, trying year in dreary Germany - they've been made so much stronger by it. They're patient. They find one another's faults virtuous and endearing. They're mad for each other. And they have been for longer than I've been gone.
I admire it as much as I admire anything in this world.

When I meander through Boulder, a city that could have been tailor-made for me, I miss living here.
But I don't miss the life I had. That wasn't the life I had.
I miss the life I could have had. Could still have, if I want it.

The months of perfect skiing/riding, the "Napa Valley of beer," the prevailing Buddhist culture created by Naropa and the Mind and Life Institute... the museums, the food, the tattoos, piercings and head shops... it's all so me. It's achingly me. It yells "why don't you live here?!" when I walk down the street.

And I sit in a little cafe and think about just this question. Why don't I live there?

I moved to Boston because of the art, the culture, the availability of higher learning. I moved there because it's a great place to be gay, and I want to get married some day. I moved there because I wanted to start over. Reinvent myself. And I wanted to be as far from "home" as I could possibly get.
I moved there because I thought New England sounded like it was so me. And it is. It's all the things I've listed above, and so much more (minus the head shops, which I actually have no use for anyway).
It is me.
And I mean what I've said several times on this trip:
Boston is more "home" to me than any place ever has been.

Even after seven years, each and every time I see the Boston skyline my heart jumps up and down like a giddy child about to go to Chuck E. Cheese. It never stops. It never gets old. I never look up at the Pru or the Custom House or out at the Charles and say "bleh... you again?" Every time, I thank my lucky stars that I live there.

I sit in the cafe and think about the people I love and how, apart from the Nelsons, none of them are here. My college friends have scattered to the four winds, and my high school ties were tenuous even then.

And I think a thought that is "the old me" (but obviously still very much the still-me and forever-me). I think that the woman I am meant to find and love, in that same way that Shawn and Amy love, is more likely in New England than the Rocky Mountains. "Perhaps when I'm married," I say, "If she wants to live here we'll try it for a couple years."
"It could be a nice place to have kids," I say.

Instead of a polarized magnet, always pushing me away from it, Boston still draws me towards it. I ran from Del Norte. I ran from Greeley. I ran from the mountains. I ran from my hurt, I ran from my tears, from my fears. I ran across the plains, through middle-America, up into the Catskills and on to the Atlantic. I ran nearly through my 20's, almost into my 30's.
The truth is, now I am a happy person. I am full of love and joy, and even though I am still working on many other virtues, I know that I could now come back to these places and be truly, deeply, happy.
Maybe... I would like to think... maybe now I could be happy anywhere.

Right now I'm being happy in Boston.
And I am! Can you believe it? I am!

I am so happy.

Sometimes I just have to stop and shake my head. Let my jaw drop in awe.
There is so much waiting for me. There is love and beauty and success and creation and life and life-saving and life-changing. And love. I say that one again. Love. There is more of this than I could ever pray for.

I'm so glad to go home.