Place

It's interesting what a life does.

I've been struggling with NOCO lately. With Greeley. I keep missing parts of it.

I don't miss the utter vast emptiness of most of the land, or in the heads of so many people I encountered. I don't miss the racism, I don't miss the wealth-gap, the ICE raid, the slaughter house, the poverty. I don't miss the absence of art, the distance between us and more interesting places. I don't miss the need to drive everywhere, the great rolling sidewalks going nowhere in suburbia. I also don't miss winter. Not yet.

But I keep missing the familiarity of it. There are certain places I've been revisiting. Places under trees. Certain drives. The proximity to so many friends and good times.

I'm not sure why I feel this way. I never really felt this about the Springs, or at least I don't recall feeling this about it. I never actually missed it. I ran from there and never looked back, and while there's a certain calm about knowing a place inside out, there is no sort of correctness I feel in going back there.

I will not need to test this with Greeley, since even Dani has left. And I'm okay with that. Because I really did not like living there.

Which makes me wonder why I'm still thinking about it.

Really I knit together all the good places. Estas Park. That little italian place in Boulder. Most of our favorite Denver-places. Pikes Perk. Manitou. The park and all of Missy's neighborhood, the bike ride to the Trib on 7th next to all those houses and all those kids playing with soccer balls and all that wonderful mariachi music. The burritos from that place on 8th. What being at Margie's felt like. In my mind it is all part of one place. And sometimes when I'm tired and insomniatic and too broke to take a bus ride into the city, too sleepy to walk, too worried I'll want to walk when I get there to drive, I think of these places and I wonder. I think of these places as if they were one place, romanticizing what was really not exactly the best time.

And now, I also wonder about the land I see. Because the lushness and the life I see here pulses in a deep, urgent way, in a way I could have never understood without seeing it. And I love where I live more than I have ever loved being anywhere.

I wonder if I am not actually a city person.

I love living here. Every time I leave my neighborhood I still think to myself, I live in the best neighborhood in Portland, and why would I want to live in any other section of town?

But I do not love it with the raw intensity that I love, say, the Willamette valley. Or the land around 99W.

I've been thinking this since July.
Cheryl noticed.
So that's something.

It is time for me to live here. That is certain. Because I am here now, so that means I should be. I also do not know how I would get art started at all if I did not live here, if I did not have the IPRC and billions of tiny galleries and small presses at my fingertips. I have to get started here.

And if I left I could see myself returning. Portland has been very good to me and it feels correct in a way that no place ever has.

Mostly this means I think: I will be able to leave.
I wasn't sure I would be able to, before. All these Germany? India? Migrant middle American farmhand? ideas were with the worry in the back of my mind that leaving Portland would be impossible, once here.

But I think what this means is that is not the case.
I will want to return.
Again and again.
This is home.
What I wonder now: where else is there?