We Simply Choose to Forget

Yesterday was my tenth year in NYC. I wrote the night before into midnight and announced to Sarah that indeed we had survived and thrived in the Big Apple for a decade! I have been finding myself going back to Memorial Day all those ten years ago, sitting in Leila's room, the place devastated and empty, drinking wine and crying, looking out her window to the street we had come to live on for only six months. 'What have I done?' kept going through my mind. Would I ruin my daughters' lives? Would I make it there?

All I knew was I couldn't go on living single in the double world of El Paso. I was in a job I hated and had performed the worst of my career, and just felt so alone. My brother, Steve, talked of NYC one night at Smokey's and he lost himself for a minute and I heard him, really heard him, and knew that was where I needed to go, that he was speaking to me! And now I know it wasn't even for me as much as to get the girls out of a patriarchal desert and into the lushness of opportunity.

They are well on their way now, ten years later.

Me? I'm finding my stride.

For most of these ten years I have pined deeply, mourned for the Southwest - for my griese bushes and sunsets - for the open highway. I think I always will.

But I need this damn energy, this damn friction, smoothness mixed with grit.

I'm home.

But when I am really homesick (as I feel oddly right now) I go back in my mind's eye and drive the streets of the Pass of the North. I go down Montana street, feeling the searing heat of the sun, over to where my ex is buried, and across the way, my Daddy. I round the bend from Beaumont Hospital, taking my Mama home after a long, cruel day, her head on the headrest as I drive. I go to Trans Mountain and stare at my beautiful city, the massive spread of land. I go onto I-10 East and travel back to Dallas to where my first love found me and then let me go when I too easily left.

Barbra Streisand is singing "The Way We Were" on my ipod as I type this.

I go on.

Ten years went fast. The next decade, I pray, slows down. I have much to do.

And here I go.