Dallas was painted so morosely in my mind. Black tints to everything. It was the Past--capital P. It was the dim and the slow and the backsteps. It was awful things that made me feel caged and small and nervous.
And this year has had those moments. It's much easier to be caged in places of your past. The bars are already up. The barriers are already up. They are just waiting for you to walk into the open doors. But with the experience of being away, you can see the traps sooner.
I viewed returning to Dallas as returning to the person I was in Dallas when I was young but she is (thankfully) gone. Dallas was not as terrifying when I am me and not her. She lurks around setting those traps of above but her weakness is my strength.
Last year at this date, I wouldn't imagine that I returned to Nw York because of a play I wrote. I wouldn't have been able to imagine that in hindsight, New York was not good to me. The people? Maybe. The place? No. We were never destined to be friends.
The Baz Luhrman/Mary Schmich production "Always Wear Sunscreen" tell us to "Live in New York once but leave before it makes you hard." I am proud of my time in New York, but I am perhaps even more proud of the months since and the haze of emotions that I've waded through and the clarity found in distance.
For New York was foreign to me, and it no longer is. That is an accomplishment. And Dallas was familiar yet foreign to me, and it no longer is. That is an accomplishment.
I left as a child and returned as an adult. I have been rediscovering Dallas with the grace of a baby, tripping and falling and making messes of things other people cannot fathom. I've been covered in paint, and grass clippings and left alone, so very alone and so very surrounded. I had to learn again how to make polite small talk with strangers who will talk to you. Ever presence kindness has infiltrated my life again, and it makes me smile. I have to hold my tongue a bit more and be more clever when I disagree with someone's ideas. I'm being accosted with mindsets I was quick to forget, and when I leave again perhaps I won't shuttle them away so quickly. I have found the joy in lawn care. I awake in a house so brightly colored that it gets compared to Monet's Giverny home. And I love it. I still have some belongings in boxes. And I'm still "trying" to unpack them. I don't mind that they are in boxes. They amuse me. My unpacked boxes sitting in my home. A pause in my nomadic life.
And as I still (and perhaps constantly) look to the horizon, to the next great adventure, and next great city and next great part of my life, I am content where I am sitting now. Sitting on a front porch with a beer and a breeze reminiscing of all that has come before and all that is in the future. Dallas may just be a way station, but for the time being, its the nicest one I've stayed at in a long time.
To another good year.
No comments:
Post a Comment