Where I Am

There’s a sort of ambivalence in the atmosphere here where I live now.

A sort of peace from the sky and the temperature and the surroundings.

Though it’s only late June, and summer has just begun, I feel as though I am somehow already in mid-August back in San Diego, where the heat defined the way we lived as it oppressed and beleaguered even the mightiest of wills. This new country lacks what hills I could hope to call Heights, and lows Valleys, and what’s more, an Ocean consistently tearing down and building up the Western Reaches of the city. An ocean at all would be something, but regardless what’s missing, it feels like home, and I can’t begin to say how wonderful it feels to finally feel like I might belong in a place.

There weren’t many days that passed without me thinking back on the life I had there, in the Garden State, on the Heights, by myself; there aren’t many days that go by when I don’t think about how life could have been had I stayed there, and stuck it out, fought through the sorrow and the anger, and the detachment from my family and those I thought I had loved and had loved me.

Now it seems some days come and go without me feeling like I’m missing something important from that life, from that version of me. I can’t begin to explain how I feel the symmetry, the resonance of this place and that. I still long for the Long Shores and the Cold Nights so full of Noise, but spent alone; the smell of steel and garbage so pure and heavy in the misty air, mixed with the salty sea wind; the laughter and the smiles of all my childhood past, the tears and the quiet shock, as well.

There’s something there.
There’s something here.
And here is where I am.