Home.

So, I'm sitting at my parents' dining room table. I have got the house to myself (and the two dogs, three cats and bird). It's entirely possible that it could snow today. Ok, that's probably a slight exaggeration. I guess I have to leave room for the fact that any cloud cover here means I am going to be cold, which is what's actually happening. But still. It's spring in Colorado and you never really know, do you?
I've been here for 6 days now and it's been nuts, like it always is. Running all around Colorado trying to squish every little bit of the state into ten days is not the easiest thing ever. It is something I keep doing to myself and maybe I should consider a longer vacation next time. But my commitment phobia does not limit itself to relationships and TV series. I am just as scared of a long vacation as I am of feeling hooked into people that do or maybe don't exist for any promised amount of time. In that vein, how do people consciously and happily get involved with TV shows like that? If you started watching Lost and you just stopped watching Lost, you decided to enter into a relationship without a foreseeable end. And what happened? You were there for six freaking years! How anybody leaps with glee into addiction is beyond me. I feel the same way about personal relationships, but that's deeper than I'm going to go on a dumb blog that no one reads.
Anyway, I have finally reached a few moments where I do not have any planned meetings or events to get to. That moment inside a short vacation where you can finally breathe is a conflicted one. You're glad for it, right? You're glad to have, at some point in the recent past, allotted yourself a few hours where there is truly nothing to do. Flip the coin, though, and it's a maddening few hours. I am sitting here racking my brain for who I have not yet seen and what I have not yet done. Sure that there is something I'm missing. Half sure that what I'm missing is rest, honestly, and I should relish this opportunity. But rest was not part of the deal here.
It's been a different visit than it usually is. I've done this vacation home thing a few times now and it's always the same. I drive through the Garden for nostalgia's sake. Remembering the picnics and midnight visits and all the people whom I've taken on this drive as they've passed through my life. I bring a 12 pack of Fat Tire to a friend's house, fully aware that they'll be left with 8 of them when I leave. I go to the mall with lofty intentions. Planning my new wardrobe in my head. Excited at the thought of cheap, cute summer clothes that were not purchased at exactly the same place that the 45 people I live with shop every time they need something new. It never goes the way it should, though, and I find myself searching desperately for the exits as I can no longer handle fluorescent lighting or an abundance of concrete surrounding me. I usually go to Fort Collins and come back from Fort Collins and fall in love with driving for hours. I go out to the bars and soak up feeling out of place. I can say that downtown Colorado Springs is not somewhere that makes me want to fit in. I wear heels as long as I can stand them and then bring the flops out of my purse and proceed to get funny looks all night long. I make a mess out of the room that still looks like it did when I was 17, looking through my drawers and closet and the boxes of my things that my mom has packed up. I don't know what I am looking for, but I look every time. At the end of the trip, I am both sad and happy to say goodbye to the place again. I'm ready to get back to whatever beach I left behind for a few weeks and the friends that are there.
Here's where it's different. The leaving thing. I know it's still almost a week away, but I feel totally different about going back to the islands this time. There must have been a Big Maho party last night. I saw announcements about it all over Facebook. And for the first time in years and years, I didn't wish that I was there. I have looked at the pictures people have posted in the week that I have been gone and there was no pang of envy. No little sting that made me wish I was there. Nothing.
I could ponder why that is. Wonder if it's because I am finally getting tired of the Caribbean (I am) or if it's because I have enough of my own pictures from my own Big Maho parties (I do). But those aren't the reasons. The reason I am not chomping at the bit to get back to my life on vacation has nothing to do with my life on vacation. It has much more to do with what I've left behind while I've been there.
I came home this month because two very good friends got married. A couple I have known since I was 15 tied the knot and I couldn't fathom not being here for the big day. It turns out, I wasn't the only one. A group of people I have not seen breathe the same air for about a decade was finally in one room again. It became more than a simple happy reunion, although it certainly was that. It was like we all looked around and thought, "Why the hell did this take so long?"
I have met a lot of people in the last five years. A lot. Nomads and homebodies and people who are trying to find some title in between. I have seen people come and go and I have been one of the people who always seems to leave. I write letters in an attempt to touch my fingertips to some of the people I'm afraid I've lost. I recently noticed that most of those letters are written from an airplane seat and are rarely finished and never sent. It's not that I'm ok with letting all of these people go. I'm not, really. It just feels like something I have gotten used to and have begun to regard as a normal, necessary part of my twenties. And so I have lived for the last 5 years. With fairly deep if entirely temporary attachments to amazing, wonderful people I am doomed to wish I had known for a little longer.
Enter this crew of old friends. The way I felt around them caught me off-guard. Sure, they've known me forever. They have seen me change and stay the same. Ups and downs, boyfriends and break-ups. They met me in all my JCPenney clad, bass clarinet rocking glory and somehow liked me, anyway. Though I never grew all the way out of my nerd phase, I can at least mask it with a good tan and lip gloss now; I had no such self awareness nor pressing need for social self preservation at 15 years old. The person they met was just me. Awkward, unsure, hopelessly ridiculous and juvenile. Dancing circles in the rain with my arms stretched from my sides. In love with 'N Sync. Boy crazy and restless. All this and they still wanted to hang out with me? I didn't get it then and I don't really get it now. Every single one of these people is infinitely cooler and more interesting than I could even try to be. But at 15 years old, they took me in and thus started the kind of relationships that I would never be able to replicate.
I have missed them. I had no idea how much I have missed them. We have all gone on to live drastically different lives and to examine us all individually would leave you wondering how the friendships have survived. We have a teacher, a zookeeper, a veterinarian, a photographer and a wanna-be gypsy. Some are married, some divorced, many still single. We have lived all over and out of the country, stopping in to say hello when we can and running off again, barely adjusting the rearview mirror enough to check out who we just waved goodbye to. And then the universe was kind and two of us fell in love and it finally happened. A reason. An excuse to see each other for real again and remember why we have such sweet tasting memories of all the nights we spent huddled together. As many miles and years as are between us now, it didn't feel like anything had changed. As it turns out, the only thing different since my nerd days is the tan. Well, I probably couldn't exactly rock a bass clarinet if you handed me one right now...But for the most part, I am the same. It took seeing them to figure that out and remember that there are people I don't have to write letters to. They're still here. They still love me and I still love them and they will be my intangible, abstract definition of home for as far into the future as I can see.
So, now I know.