My Hometown

I came home to Chicago to visit my family for the week. . . and my dog, a big fluffy Rottweiler/Lab mix.  I love that dog.  She's a bitch, but I love her. 

Taking her for a walk around the neighborhood was so surreal.  That town was my childhood.  We played Ghost in the Graveyard on cool summer nights and smoked pot at the small park down the street.  Our names are still carved in the gazebo.  It never ceases to amaze me how the nostalgia of youth can be both painful and glorious at the same time.  How different my hometown can look as a child, as a teenager, and as an adult.  Same world, same homes; different people.  As a little girl, I loved this neighborhood; I loved the familiarity and safeness of it all.  I knew the grown-ups around me and felt, with that knowledge, I would always be protected.  As a teenager I hated this neighborhood; the bourgeois, middle class life seemed to threaten the veiled idealism I carried around with me.  But, as an adult, jaded by disappointment and self-doubt, I cherish this neighborhood.  The summer shadows that cast themselves upon the faded pavement, the way the leaves move like velvet through the trees every time the wind picks up.  The quietness of it all.  I used to climb a tree out side our house and stare out at the empty intersection, the way the street lamp cast a warm glow upon it.  I used to get lost in the mere peacefulness of it all.

I wonder if we are forever meant to want what we can't have and to persecute all that's in our grasp; to escape from simplicity out of fear that our lives aren't worth living without the heavy, uneven breadth of complication endlessly aggravating every gift of solidity that rises in it's absence.  I don't know if it is better to yearn and to dream, chasing visions of hope like a feather in the wind or to rest easy and peacefully and to take in what comes without anticipating anything but the warm embrace of consistency; the familiar faces and sunsets that you learn to depend on and know you love. 

I want to be passionate and safe; wild and familiar; to live in a world that is ever-changing but beautifully reliable.  I want to have my cake and eat it too.  But I guess even Utopia wears a poker face.