Going "Home"
You can't, not really.
Was in my hometown today. Doesn’t feel like home much anymore. You can’t go home again because home is a place another you inhabited.
Drove down a street full of cars and memories. Both were crowding me in different ways. Traffic isn’t limited to either asphalt or nostalgia.
The storefront church responsible for my formative years is for lease. The jewelers that were next door have left, in their place a vetbro friendly tactical fanboy store.
On the other side a dive bar with my name on it is now the “Rum Runner” and a jaunty pirate oversees the day drinkers in a place now more Jimmy Buffett than Tom Waits.
A block away, Dunkin Donuts bailed, leaving behind a “local” shop that’s probably run by Koreans since Seoul exports dystopian game shows, pop groups, and work ethic in quantity.
But I’m on this street for other reasons, because just past the over irrigated golf course is one of many trailheads that dot the city bound mountain preserve.
Because for all its changes, one thing still remains constant, and it is the desert the makes its craggy way through the heart of a metropolis often devoid of identity and reason.
It’s a place that should not exist, where the weather for much of the year does its best to make the case that humans should have kept moving West to the sea. And in its heart are these mountains.
As mountains go they’re unremarkable. They’re the smaller siblings of grander peaks to the north and elsewhere. But they still serve as they always have, as a reminder that this blue marble was once devoid of us bipedal interlopers. And will in all probability thrive upon our departure, whether locally or en masse.
As they are, these peaks are still home. Still a place that speaks to whatever psychic fragments pass for my soul.