Never Walked In High Heels

              Getting off the airplane, I could feel my hair frizz instantly. This was my third time zone in five days. I had been from London to Las Vegas to Charlotte, which meant that I had traveled eight thousand miles and then half way backwards to get to where I wanted to be. I mean, my college town wasn’t particularly high on my list of vacation destinations, but like most places I travel to, I had work to do. In the next few weeks, there were three weddings, a baptismal service, four new babies to be introduced to, massive amounts of research to be done via the college’s inter library loan system, and an inbox full of people to see. All I could think about was how stupid I was not to bring a straightener.

              Last spring I went with my mom to a different small town in the south. Riding through its hills, she would point out to me things that had changed or places where people used to live with the enthusiasm or informative sense of a tour guide. She was grasping at straws and knew it, despite my feigned attempts at intelligent questions. I felt no connection to this place. The town was fully hers but it never would be mine. And this fact made my mother desperate.

              My parents moved my senior year of college from Chicago to Las Vegas, making it impossible to come home to the big city again. A year before they moved, I had made up my mind to live in London post graduation so the fact that they were moving had relatively little impact on me. Life moved on fast, and it went even faster when I was twenty.

              Now when I visit ‘home’ in Las Vegas, it doesn’t feel particularly familiar. It’s very relaxing, escaping the desert heat with the pool in our backyard or watching the palm trees sway gently in the sky. But nothing about it brings back any sort of nostalgia. It’s all new and in mint condition. And quite honestly, other than having my parents out there, I feel more like a foreigner in Las Vegas than I ever do in London.

              So I’ve been priding myself on being a wayfarer for several years now. I keep picking up and moving every time a better opportunity hits. My exercise in Spartan living which began my first year of college has turned into a festival of non commitment, always waiting for the most impressive option.

              Stepping off the plane this time, no one was there to greet me. Due to my disability the person picking me up from the airport is usually allowed past security and through to the gate. One of my best friends from college, whom I hadn’t seen for three years, was nowhere to be found. And so I stopped, and sat, and listened to the raw twangs and drawls. The air had a weight in my nose and lungs which balanced in familiar places from the humidity. And there was this musky smell I had forgotten about which went through places even as public as an airport. The humid summer air made my hair frizz.

              And there they were, my friends. Two of them came as a surprise. We figured out later that, between the three of us, we had traveled enough miles in three years to go fully around the equator over fourteen times in the past three years. And despite having months of not speaking and not having any way to catch up, nothing had changed. We were different people who still fit together around the exact same edges even after the picture on the puzzle changed. Like family, we were inseparable even after three years of growing up in the real world. Blood and genetics didn’t bind people as much as passions and knowing each other did.

              Very unexpectedly, I found myself at home. And everything about it was exactly how it should’ve been.