Promises, of What I Seemed to Be

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And now I'm back here. Just a fortnight away and the place seems so very different with its towering treeline, that close horizon, with its narrow streets, fecund scent and its deep-south attempt at winter chill.

I didn't miss it. Certainly, I was ready to come home for fear of all the things that I had left unattended, of all the obligations that I still kept to. But I didn't pine for it. There was no place within me left empty for the lack of it.

I am certain that I will return there, to that faceless place, not to stay, I shouldn't think, but because it is now so simply convenient and so barely familiar and because there are so many new obligations on the far side of the continent.

What is this, this dwindling sense of place and this lingering sense of departure from I-know-not-where? Have I been too long here? Am I searching for searching's sake? Am I just tired of the weather but afraid of somewhere that has none? Have I habituated to my expectations of my home, of my friends, of my work in the Phoenix city? Have those closest to me been right all along that I was never really meant to stay? Why, then does no other destination seem all that appealing in itself; this new one feels appropriate only out of happenstance.

Time will tell.