kellan_the_tabby

A little something I wrote on the plane on the way back to PA, and some related thoughts:

As we taxi out to the runway I see a single tumbleweed making its way across the pristine expanse of snow. I lose sight of it behind the wing, and strain to catch its reappearance; as the airplane makes its final turn it emerges and rolls under the plane, directly beneath my window. Whereupon it probably immediately gets run over, but I choose to see it as a 'fare you well and come home soon' from Colorado anyway.

The plane takes off north - north towards home, but only briefly before it banks east, towards home.

Home. I'm going home today, for a week, and then on New Year's Day I'll be coming home again.

Home. It's an odd thought, one way or the other. I'm looking forward to seeing people. I'm going to miss people as well. I suppose I'm looking forward to being in Pennsylvania ... I suppose.

--

Rereading it just now as I typed it in, it's not such an odd thought any more. Colorado is home. I missed it the whole time I was in Pennsylvania. Sure, I missed Tom and Ray and Dwen; I missed my cats and rats and being in my place but most of all I missed Colorado; the clean clear air and the snow and the low rolling hills rising up the the mountains o gods the mountains, always just there. I could feel them not there on the East Coast, like a physical ache.

Sit and think, for a moment. Most of the time, nagging just below your conscious thoughts, there's a need or two. I need to pee, I need to eat. I need to sit down because my feet hurt. I need a drink of water and something to put on my chapped lips. I need to go home.

Highest on my list was the need to go home.

I knew Colorado was home already, mind you. I've known for twelve years now that home was somewhere in the west, somewhere with dry air and mountains. I forgot it from time to time. For years at a time, until I came out here again summer before last. I remembered...and I put the remembering away, because it wasn't going to happen. Clearly.

And now? I'm here. I'm home. And I didn't truly know it until I left it. From the moment I touched ground in Philly, I needed to go home. I felt as if I could point west without looking (I couldn't; I tried). I mistook cloud banks for mountains (and then got grumpy when I was wrong). I did get used to the extra oxygen quickly enough, but I didn't get used to either the extra humidity or the pollution. I coughed from when I got off the airplane in Philly to when I got home to real air.

And...none of that is more than symptoms. I ached to be home. And now I'm home, and it's just as good as I remembered it being.