I'm headed West with a catcher in the rye, a book thief, a velveteen rabbit, a bird, a bear named Grugsly, and a ring on my left hand.
I'm walking long and tired to get there, and I've spent more than a couple of nights staring into the night sky waiting for the sun to shine on the "there" I've been walking to because that is all going West is:
It's that dream that's on the other side of here. It's what settlers were frying in their pans over camp fires and the flame that they danced around and the stars they stared at. It made wagons' wheels turn, drew maps, and wrote stories.
The West is where people who can't sleep go, the ones who lie awake staring at their fans. It's the place where wandering feet wander to.
Some call it Colorado, or Spain, or Prague. Some call it Auburn or Kiesal or Overall. Some call it New York or California or Italy.
I'm not sure yet what I'll call my West because I'm still walking long and hard looking to find it. But what I do know is that those who go looking for it tell good stories, learn something about the world and themselves, their regrets are shadowed by their joys, and they sleep well.
For now, it's Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains. It's still and quiet and cool. It blows through my open windows and rustles the curtains. It gives me time to sit in my chair, to place words side by side until I've written a story which in itself is wonderful because it's been so hard to find time to write this past year.
Right now, my West is something restful and quiet and far away from everything familiar. But in that space, my writing has come back to me, I've gotten reacquainted with humming, and I feel I could run outside for miles and miles.
My room overlooks a pretty green yard. Iris, the cat, watches me and keeps her distance most of the time. I've found her weakness in belly scratches and I'll give the conclusion of that fact when the summer ends. My space at the magazine is spacey and the windows are nice. People are friendly and try very hard to say all of my name. Work feels more like something I do naturally than something I have to study to do or try to do. But mostly, my drive to work is in the middle of nowhere and I get to forget everything in those 18 minutes driving and enjoy my 6 hours while there.
In my mind, the West was always depicted as something vast, something that stretches for miles, but since being here, and after an 18 hour drive to Burlington, I know that's not true. Sometimes it's a person, sometimes it's a chair, and sometimes it's a lake. Sometimes it's just a tiny thought, or a food you wanted to try, or a prayer you wanted to say or a sentence you wanted to write. Sometimes it's loving someone, doing something that scares you, or trying something you've never done before.
And like I said a long, long, long time ago when I first went to Auburn, "if you do what you've always done, you'll be who you always were". And what's the fun in that?
