Going Home

It's probably strange that I still think of San Diego as 'home' after all these years, a place where I last lived permanently when I was 5. By now that's less than a third of my life and by any sort of logic San Jose, Morgan Hill, Sacramento and Folsom all have as much right to a claim on my heart as San Diego does.

The Coyote Valley was where I truly grew up (and so far the place I stayed longest) but it has less than no hold over me. It's a place on the map, a few mostly forgotten memories and severed friendships I was already growing out of before we left. Mostly it exists in stories that start with 'Back when I was a public school kid...'. And Sacramento...well, I don't think the greater Sacramento area will ever be home. No matter how long we stay, no matter how many friends live here, no matter how many memories we make. It remains a physical place to me, with no emotional connection. It's not a place I've ever planned on staying in, a glorified cow-town full over conservatives and white trash (not to say I'm any better). When I leave I don't miss it, when I come back I look forward to going somewhere else again. The mountains, maybe...the mountains I love, but not the valley.

Unlike the others San Diego remains a place I can call home in my heart (a silly romanticized notion 'Home is where the heart is', but don't teenagers love those things?) above all others. Maybe because above all else I love the ocean, and they have by far the best beaches in California (though I won't turn my nose up at NorCal coast in the middle of winter, if that's all that's being offered). Or because the weather suits me (hot and dry and hot and dry, a sort of permanent summer). Or because of the theme parks and museums that I hardly remember. Because of the Zoo and the Wild Animal Park that I utterly adore and could spend weeks in at a time. A romanticized notion of childhood, or because that remains the place I associate with family and yearly trips to visit them, though the family that I care about have all moved here by now and there's no excuse to visit anymore.

It's silly, pointless, stupid to have such an emotional connection to a place that only exists to me in cloudy memory, but there it is. And I can't wait to be going back, going Home, even for a little while.