Returning home now from four days and four nights in the temperate, snow-free bay area, and trying to wrap my head around the lingering emotional taste it has left in my brain. A brief dream of my past existence. I guess that’s what it felt like. The differences are many between waking life and Nemo’s kingdom, but for now I find myself focusing on the personal trade-offs. My acquaintances back . . . ?home? . . . the folks that I now return to, in my mind, are cardboard cutout friends, the two-dimensional, movie-prop versions of the people I’m once again leaving behind. While booking my flights I assumed four days would be plenty of time to see everyone. Retrospect colors it a compromise at best. Interacting with many of the people I know in California for thirty to three hundred minutes, oft-overlapping, was a tease, and I feel like I’m leaving too soon.
And yet, I don’t want my old life back. I was done with my old job and I haven’t changed my mind about that. Colorado is full of positives. I love the languid pace of life, the inescapable natural beauty, the daily physical activity and the abundance of time for mental pursuits. Of course, I could have had brain-time back in Cali. The opportunity cost is clear; swap socializing (and of course, ever-alluring lethargy) for sitting alone, fingers dancing on the keyboard. It’s a trade I could have made long ago just as readily, but not as easily; too many people it’s too tempting to visit.
I don’t always fit into platitudes. Absence makes my heart scab over, but returning has picked it away, the dead flakes of protective emotional numbness falling to the ground, crusted crimson biohazardous waste now serving no purpose other than awaiting its own decay. I try now to solidify metaphor, to find a way to poke my mental fingers into that unguarded organ and feel something coherent, but I can’t dig deep enough. It simmers below the surface, releasing vapors of emotion too vague to embrace and experience fully.
I’m pinching myself now and failing to feel pain. I want to keep exploring this slumberland but I’m falling without moving, my eyes being pried open against my will. The dream is ending.
Miss you.