California Dreamin'

New York in a tumble of sweltering heat, of unbearable humidity, seeming not so much as a spring evening in early April as musky August nights in the Deep South. I pack my bags to revisit the End of the Road three years back, and I remember the nights leading up to it. Hot, thick Alabama nights where cicadas are louder than the air conditioners. Dry lightning storms in New Mexico as we raced toward the bright lights of Vegas. And there, at the end of the earth, two plastic chairs on a Venice Beach rooftop. We had run out of words, so we stared at the setting sun in silence.

But if Home is where the heart is, and your heart is on the Road, then what is an apartment? What is stability worth? The Word is yours. Once you are done with school, just go. Back to America, to New York, to Madness, to the Word. Go home to them while there is still time.
(journal excerpt, September 2007)

I return now, the person who was so changed on that trip, and still so much the same. Like predicted, much of Road Revelations fall away, and I have nothing but scribbled words in a notebook to remind me. I return to reap the rewards of that trip, of that work, but mostly I pray that I can again capture the Madness of the last trip. The night that told me, that cemented, that it was not my choice to make. The wide, prepared path spread out before me like a safe freeway into the decent life. I took my bag, I took my books, and I ran as fast as I could in a whole other direction.

It's not that I don't ever look back. It's that I never regret the path I chose. And I think that somewhere, on a plastic chair with a view of the Pacific, the girl who found herself upended and overwhelmed in California sunshine, is looking right back at me, content.

Buy the ticket.
Take the ride.
Feel the free.