What am I doing here, in this stretched out town?  Be a city or don’t.  Love me and want me, or stop.  But this in between, I can’t take it.

                Don’t be so recognizable, so mashed-potatoey and comfortable, with the coffee shops and bike racks that are shaped differently and have been repainted, but are still full of things I know, of smells and tastes my senses forgot they were dying to come back to.  You show me the same shadowy corners I was fearful of before, social missteps that stretch my past mistakes out on walls in front of me with slide-show nostalgia.  Five years proves to be less an eraser and more a magnifying glass to my perennial self-awareness.

                I could take it, you know, if you would just give me a little consistency.  I left you when I left high school, and expected you to do the same, to mature accordingly.  Or maybe I expected you to stay just the same, frozen at the sight of my determined heels, a beanbag, loved but unused and forgotten in a basement corner.  There would be spiders to befriend you of course.  And I promise it won’t be so lonely, and I’ll come back from time to time, as long as you are your same lumpy self when I make the back last.

                While I was off dancing and chasing alcohol through swollen veins and falling in love and breathing foreign air and living stories instead of writing them, this is what I was thinking at you.  But telepathy still has a few centuries to go, or maybe I just don’t know how to concentrate hard enough, but either way you didn’t hear or listen or in your lively petulance chose both and now your lumps don’t fit me.

                It’s like that friend you have who is the first to have a baby.  You are astounded and you can’t believe it, and this little alien thing came from her?  When you see her for the first time, you expect her to be maternal and expansive with diapers in her back pocket and binkys for hair clips.  Except the kid’s with the sitter or her dad and she’s ordering another round of shots and borrowing your favorite pair of jeans.  And you’re still jealous of her ass, and that’s just not what happens when someone has a baby right?

                It’s like this town had a baby, and I’m too afraid to hold it.

                I like you, city, I really do, so don’t cry, or worse, show me your eyes rolling, your disinterest and apathy radiating.  I’d like to be your friend.  I want to go inside your crevices and hold hands with the culture you’ve reared.  The egg cracked in my blind youth, it must have, stretching out sticky young down into the cool Colorado breeze despite my distraction.

                I am here now, seeing how you’ve dressed your young and groomed yourself, but still wondering helplessly what habits you’ve practiced to look this way.

                And what are you eating?  You look so thin and lovely.

                I have woken to this feeling before.  The world boxing my ears or pinching my nose with uproarious and sapient giggles.  My eyes water until they’ve been cleansed of the grime of self-importance or the crisis of despair.  The ticklish pain is doubly so, what with all of this new European poise I’ve been carrying around (that no one else in the world could even dream of possessing).  And, what a victim!, look at me walking into every bar and shouting:

                I know everybody here!

                Why don’t I know anyone here?

                You are bringing me my favorite fall, chasing away the sweat of August with a rustling cinnamon wind.  Nothing is dying yet, there is still color everywhere, even more vivid as it totters on the quick edge of rot.  But here you can still eat it in all its organic geometry, its vegetal length and curve.  You let me wash it all down with water that lacks the tough round shape of chemicals and chlorine.

                This is familiar.  This is what I know.  I brought home with me an ability to love from so many angles the things I put on my insides.

                So help me learn to spell it all into home.  Bring bodies my way whose elbows and hips and knees can bend with peaceful yogic breath into those letters.  Give me brand new bicycle chains on old Fuji frames and hot dog stands scenting different corners with their unhealthy yet blissfully curled redolence.  Give me dances of English words on paper and Spanish words on tongues, or at least a healthy enough drive to find them.  Give me cohorts with lots of years in their back pockets or little.  Help me learn to hold my hand behind the newborn’s head with confidence and to later joyfully dance on the table with her mother, shaking our hair out like the old days.

                Give me all of these things, and I will study them.  And then, when spelling bee season comes around again, I’ll know just how to form the words between city and town, old and new, afraid and familiar, here and here.

                And I will give you thanks, for helping me feel my smiling crying way around the A, the N and the D.