The Long and Winding Road

This past weekend, I visited a friend in Bonny Doon. I crossed 17 (it wasn't anywhere as narrow and frightening as I remember), and wound my way through the mountains and trees with a strange reflex in my hands and feet. It was as though the corners of the highway still lived in my muscles, the anticipation of the banked curves, weaving through the living mountain like a river that had never been dry.

My heart sped up a little. I was reaching the end of Scotts Valley. A bizarre excitement swept through me. How to describe... but alas, there are no words for it, nothing in this pathetic human tongue to fully encapsulate the lightning that raced through me. Only feeling. A tightness of the throat, a pressure in the lungs, a fatigue in my quads. A shiver down the spine. A twitch of the ears.

There, in full view, burst Santa Cruz.

Some say a bell went off in their head when they first laid eyes on their soul-mate. Some people say that accepting a certain job that later becomes the career they were always called to do fits as comfortably and immediately as a favorite shoe. Here?

My immediate thought, like being smacked full-force with a gust of fresh air... was very simply:

"My god. I'm home."

A familiar buzz surrounded me, an energy with a mind of its own, the shadows shifting between the trees with the little spirits that I once called by name. The air itself was alive, whispering to me in a thousand voices unheard by the human ear. The branches of the redwoods reached out overhead like banners, waving to me as I passed by. The familiar windows, the old houses, the grumpy little shops, all smiling back at me through the rain. I found myself laughing out loud, almost insane, drunk with the feeling I never knew I'd lost, the feeling of being for once and for truly home.

I had reached the conclusion not more than three weeks ago that I could never go home again, for I had no home to return to. My childhood home was long gone, corrupted and changed beyond recognition. My heart broken, my friends scattered, my family living in some remote place that I had no real connection to and that refused whatever roots I DID try to put down. The very land itself rejected me, softly, gently, in that insistent but sad way someone who does not return your sentiments will politely decline your affections. I could almost hear the wind breathing into my ears that I could stay as long as I liked, but I would never truly fit in. And so, it was with a regretful determination that I shouldered the mantle of Vagabond, reasoning that I came from a long line of Wastrels and Nomads, surely this was simply a lesson to learn. And so, setting my jaw, I wandered to the Bay Area again, hoping that at least the familiarity would be some solace, the friends I could find would be enough to sustain me.

The shocks do not stop coming.

Not only are my friends coming out of the woodwork, and not nearly as far from me as I feared, but the land itself seems to rise up to meet me. The sun warms me with a friendly touch, the breezes caress my skin with what I can only describe as the tenderness of a lover, the earth laughs with me as I walk. And the profound loss I felt at being ripped away from the familiar was filled up to the brim and overflowing with a joy that refuses to subside.

And that moment hit me square in the chest, with all the force of a brick but yet with a fluid softness of a sudden deluge.

Home was here, the whole time, waiting for me to come back.

And my god.

Here I am.