Old Post Found...

I was browsing some of my old posts and found this. I thought it was interesting in light of my recent move. Enjoy...

Leaving Las Vegas

Despite Austin being my adopted city, I will always consider Las Vegas, Nevada home. The wonderment and joy associated with going home still awes me. Every time I step unto the plane, and feel the cold radiate from the steel covered hull and the smell of the artificial air, I become overwhelmed with homesickness. Looking out my tiny portal, over the strip of light bouncing off the wing, I can look down unto a miniature world covered with a patched blanket of puffed white clouds. Emerging from my cocoon, I juxapositionally regress to an earlier stage as the dry heat envelopes me. Here I have no responsibilities, no car, no job, and no demands on my time. I am chauffeured around, I don’t have to pay for movies, someone else makes dinner, and I spend my day cuddled under a blanket I can remember from childhood. This is where the trite saying, “it is like coming home” stems from, but it is not possible that two dimensional words can fully describe the three dimensional emotion.

Even though the entire city is so familiar and reminiscent of the younger me, ever year it changes by miniscule amounts. It is a cumulative change that you don’t notice all at once, like the growth of a baby. Every year I am gone, everything ages a year, everything gets a year older. Like flowers saved in a memory box, thing slowly become a shadow of their former selves. Things are different; I am different. I pass along the ever present pastel stucco of the house and over-run rock garden now as an adult. Childhood has been whisked away. Walls that were one covered with gapped smiles and pig tails now holds son-in-laws, grandchildren, and Hawaiian vacations. We are down to one family pet. The fish tank sits fallow and empty in the garage, and two cats buried next to it. Every year my father’s hair fades another shade closer to grey, and his belt has to be let out another notch. Even the sun bleached city itself seems to age along with me. The wood, cement, glass, and paint that make up the metropolis are ever changing like cells, but despite the flux it still matures like any other body. Old and tired, it is still my town, my home, my lover and it glitters as a diamond in the desert when night falls upon it.

Last month my parents finally purchased their retirement home in the thicketed Ozarks. In a couple of years, they will be leaving Las Vegas, and consequently I will have to as well. Although Vegas will still be home, there will no epicenter to return to. I will have no base to recharge at. I will have to stay in hotels, rent a car, and be no different than any other tourist. Someday I would love to move back to my home, but I am unsure if that will ever be feasible. I feel like Vegas is about to pass out of my life forever. No matter how tight I try to hold on, it will soon slip from my grasp. For now, I will just have to enjoy what little time we have together.