I am home now, actually sitting in the kitchen and not doing any homework because I don't have any homework. My tea next to me. Gold decorations on the table. And breathing. When I got home, I breathed, big and large and deep and full. I didn't know till I saw the snow-capped mountains and the hills and the people in the rain jackets and the amazing coffee and the rain hanging in the air and the tea shops and the Marketa Irglova + Glen Hansard, I didn't know till then and all of that.
I have been holding my breath.
I let it all out yesterday, in the morning in a coffee shop waiting for Chelsea. My shoulders became less tense and I actually felt my fists uncurl and my body relax as the people around me laughed and the music I like played. It's funny how your body knows something not even your mind does. My jaw has been clenched ever since the day I left this town. There's something about this place, something beautiful. It's written in your bones after the first years of staying here, and then you forget about it. You forget about it and then you leave and come back and it is so obvious that you actually might cry about it. When you stay here for so long, you actually begin to belong. You grow into this place; I have grown into this place.
Ripping up roots is never wondrous.
I have been on and trying so hard ever since moving south. I feel like it's constantly necessary for me to make efforts. Nothing is effortless in Ashland. I'm never sure of any of it. I'm always trying to figure it out and understand. I've been so tired. I realized that yesterday, my hands around the white cup full of latte foam, "The Secret Garden" on my lap, and light spilling everywhere. Everything has been hard and hard and harder. I strive daily. I have been on the verge of collapse without even really seeing it, without seeing the floor rushing up at me as I fell. There hasn't been a day in my new town when I wasn't trying for something. There isn't a place I've found yet that is anywhere near my comfort zone, that feels anything like my heart.
I have missed all of this.
This smalltown-ness. The slow, almost poetic drawl of this place. The people with their barely noticeable accents that I am just now hearing decorate my own speech. The junipers. The mountains. The coffee shops that are so Pacific Northwest and perfect. This gentle landscape. The sun. This simplicity. The early, cold mornings in rubbers with hens clucking around my feet and blue eggs filling my pockets. Poetry on the back porch and the insistence of summer, even in the dead winter. Coffee in the French press at the long table. Family. This respect for nature that I've found nowhere else. The North Face and REI and Patagonia and dirty hiking boots in every corner. The tins of tea. The feed stores with real cowboys who wear real Stetsons and real spurs and are real and have been for generations. The canning jars that are used for everything, and canning too. This growing place. The way everything runs on seasons, not months. This neighborliness. This place, this place, this place.
I never thought I'd miss this place.
But when I came home and saw my family and sat in that coffee shop, I realized that I never really left. I dug up all of me that I could, but my heart is still here in the center of Oregon. Not the corner. Not the edge. Not the bottom half. The center. This is my comfortable place. And maybe it's like that for everyone with the place they're raised, but I feel like this might be a little bit over the top. A town should never really be an oxygen mask, but mine is, my little hometown. Funny, how I wasn't even born here, but I feel like I was. I feel like I was born again here, a second time. I feel like this is my home of homes forever and ever.
Because it's only here that I catch my breath. It's only here that the air is clear. It's only here + maybe some of the places in-between where I think I belong best.
Sometimes the things we hate the most, are dearest to us.
This place is my Mr. Darcy.
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