Somehow, in a brief moment of clarity involving a vocal hallucination and an incredibly crisp swallow of water, I stumbled upon the definition of true love and how it applies to me. Further inquiry into the subject made me realize that it never has and that, if it did, I would never get it back now. At least, not with the heavy expanse of months and miles that is preventing me from thinking too deeply about anything ever again.
Upon knowing what you have found, you become equally aware of what you have lost, and how, in some senses, it is better off that way. And one can say it constantly, but I don't think one ever truly believes it to the extent which I have forced myself to. I think that I am better off, but I would be lying if I said I don't obsess over the idea, that my main goal since arriving here has not been the inevitable return.
I had once believed that my exodus was from California, and that Florida was the Canaan of sorts, in which I would have to disparage and ruin in order to make my peaceful home. But then I realized I have simply been displaced, and that the only promised land in existance is where I have come from, and now every goal in my life revolves around how I'm going to get back, and who I will have to take with me, and who I will have to leave behind.
There is no love similar to that of love of land. I can't describe the hold certain soil has on me (and by soil, I do not mean the powdered sand that overflows beneath the sinewy roots of grass as if it cannot understand how anything grows from its bed at all) or the way I can feel the presence of rocky cliffsides and plummeting, winding streets as if I had never left at all. It shows in the way I mistake clouds for mountains, or how I expect to find a babbling brook in even the slightest grouping of trees. The love of land is all encompassing, and you miss it like you miss anything else you have loved and lost, expecting to be cradled by a soft sun and the milky scent of jasmine, but are instead beaten by choking humidity or chubby drops of rain. Even the simplest of differences in climate and terrain spawn the most terrifying bouts of nostalgia. I say nostalgia not with the bittersweet fondness that it usually entails, but with the crippling pain these recollections have caused and continue to inspire on an almost daily basis. The nostalgia I have known is not the pleasant fondness of recalling a childhood toy or a family vacation, but is a harrowing, desperate plunge into smells that haunt my senses and turn my stomach, of faces, smooth and ivory, rich and dark, whom appear and reappear in the most sinisterly reptitive of dreams, the caress of a breeze rolling on the back of the fog seeping from behind the hills, or the taste of Pacific salt water streaming down my face after having collapsed into a violent swell of a kelp encrusted wave. Nothing about these memories are comforting, but rather, torturous, knowing that they are sensations I can never recreate, and places my soles would not recognize after more years spent in these swamps and desolate jungles.
I cannot bring myself to remember the years lost or the people I can no longer touch without brief but searing moments of pain, but if anything, I am terrified to forget. The only proof I have of any life I have lived before is only the images and sensory details that I've buried deep between fleshy brain tissue and hardened coronary arteries, details which, should I forget, may one day resurface in a hurried, flashy show of gentle and engaging agony, a show that I hope to avoid at all costs. Therefore, though it troubles me to recount, the time I have lost will never make itself unknown to me, because to forget would be a far worse thing than to do without the pain of remembering. To forget means losing the most beautiful place on earth simply for the selfish purpose of acquiring the much-envied state of apathy, numbness. If I made it that far, I would no longer know how sweet the air tastes and how soft the dirt was, and how delicate the hearts of my lovers were, and how hard my heart had to become to force myself to leave it all.