Declining Latitude, Attitude

My trip comes to a close. Now, I've never taken any truly long and adventurous journeys, but even after only a week in a city that was my home for three years, I'm waiting for my flight (delayed an hour) in a shallow valley of depression, a floodplain slowly soaking up a sense of something lost and questions about what comes next.

This trip was on the horizon for so long, and now I have nothing like it to look forward to for a long time. Hawaiian organic coffee farm in April 2008? I'm looking forward to that like I'm looking forward to retirement. Tonight I'll get home and tomorrow I'll wake up, assuming I sleep at all tonight, and go to work and start it all over again, my escape thwarted by the all too efficient prison guards of work-a-day reality.

Leaving Vancouver tosses me deep into the throes of postpartum depression. There are problems with the city, for sure, as with pregnancy, but when I leave, I realize that I'm not just leaving my friends there, I'm leaving a piece of myself that has permanently attached itself to the city - a ghost of myself that's been sucked into the enduring cloud cover forever haunting the skyline. Is this what Tony Bennett meant when he realized his heart was still in San Francisco?

Los Angeles, on the other hand, only alienates. Maybe it's just too much metropolis for me to handle. Maybe it's too complicated and too glorified. When the nation, and even the world looks in your direction to be entertained...isn't that a little too much pressure for anyone else? Every time I start to feel close to L.A., it finds a new way to push me away. I don't feel pressured to perform in Vancouver. It allows me to move at my own pace rather than only at the speed of schmooze or the crawl of freeway traffic.

Of course, the longer I remain here in the South, the more attached I become. I have great friends and family here and it seems no matter where I go, I will leave someone behind. This is why people follow jobs, geography, and climate - because people are everywhere and, though distant sometimes, have a tendency to stick with you regardless. Best then to find a city that sticks to you, with or without its inhabitants, so that when you leave to visit those you love, you can return to a home you love just as much.