welcome home

Here’s the thing: when you’re driving somewhere and you don’t know where you’re going, when you’re going somewhere you’ve never been, it’s all beautiful. It’s all possibility. (This includes the possibility of driving off a cliff, my mind chants to me as I swear silently. Minor details.)

You find yourself in situations you’d never contemplated, like shimmying sideways on a two-lane road to escape a thirty-foot dust devil on an August Saturday in west Texas. You find out quickly that, much like the controllers on your Nintendo when you played Mario as a kid, your car doesn’t jump when you do. You also find out that you didn’t die. You didn’t die! And now there’s one more thing you’ve survived, another tale of badassery to add to your arsenal: I survived almost getting eaten by a killer monster dust devil.

You wind your way around canyons that call to mind Wile E. Coyote. Then you realize you’re in roadrunner country for real and it all hits home, you’ve done this thing, you’ve left the mountains you called your heart and descended into a new country full of tumbleweeds and grit in your teeth, and you can’t take it back. It’s for love, you tell yourself. It’s an adventure, you tell yourself. This is true. But when you’re rolling into town at ten at night and it’s still ninety-nine degrees outside, when the hot action on the strip is the makeshift car show outside the local Blockbuster, when you aren’t yet familiar with every other radio blasting accordion, all you can think is, I can’t take it back.

Welcome home.