Brooklyn to Boulder to Brooklyn

This morning, I woke up to 18-degree temps in Brooklyn—the heating pipe near my head hissing in insistence, the steam billowing out the roof of Key Food, the sidewalks slick with frozen slush. I started the micro-mini dishwasher and watered my one plant and tripped over the books next to my bed. I listened to the beep-beep-beep of a truck backing up below my window. All of which is perfectly normal for January, for me, for now. The weird thing is, yesterday morning at 6:20 a.m., I was in Boulder, waiting for a bus to the airport. The night before that, I went for a run on the South Boulder Creek Path. Before that, it was Steamboat and Mazzola's and bottles of 90 Schilling chilled in the trunk of the car, Dish and the Kitchen and Chautauqua in 6 inches of snow, Table 6 (tater tots—where have you been all these years?), Vail and potlucks and I-70 gridlock, Salto and the Spine and coffees and lunches and more coffees. Great friends.

Boulder, waiting for a bus. Not that weird, really. The weird thing is how it felt to wait for that bus: Boulder is so familiar to me, it's as if I was more at home at the place I visited than the place I was going home to. OK, so I lived in Colorado for seven years and it's only been five months in Brooklyn. But I'm still finding my way here (exhilarating, surprising, challenging, personal-growth-inducing)...while there (comfortable, friend-full, wholesome) is like a part of me. Right: Here being Brooklyn, and there being Boulder.

How, then, can I now be here, when there feels more like here than here does? If I lost you, well, I can't say I'm not a little bit lost myself. (I don't even know if that sentence says what I want it to!) Sense of place: what is home, anyway?

Boulder, going for a run. The sun was setting behind the Flatirons. The gravel path edged a huge field of dry grass where a couple horses were wandering around. It was warm for January—60-something and near-summery. It was strange and right on so many levels: I've run here (there?) countless times, but never as a visitor. It was quiet and empty—a silence and peace it's pretty hard to find in NY. It was foreign (creeks? Indian Peaks vistas?) and commonplace (creeks, Indian Peaks, whatever, I've seen these thousands of times). I ran away from and back to something, someone, some kind of sense.

Not to diss here. Last night, I carried my skis through Penn Station during rush hour, surrounded by thousands of commuters. I listened to people talk about Obama's inaugural address on the subway. I saw the sun go down behind skyscrapers. I walked past browstones covered in snow. As soon as I set foot here, I was energized.

Time gets messed up sometimes. Place, too. I was just in Colorado, for a blip, for 10 days and forever. It's like what Navin Johnson said: "I know we've only known each other four weeks and three days, but to me it seems like nine weeks and five days. The first day seemed like a week and the second day seemed like five days. And the third day seemed like a week again and the fourth day seemed like eight days. And the fifth day you went to see your mother and that seemed just like a day, and then you came back and later on the sixth day, in the evening, when we saw each other, that started seeming like two days, so in the evening it seemed like two days spilling over into the next day and that started seeming like four days, so at the end of the sixth day on into the seventh day, it seemed like a total of five days. And the sixth day seemed like a week and a half. I have it written down, but I can show it to you tomorrow if you want to see it." Love The Jerk.

Brooklyn to Boulder to Brooklyn. Back to Boulder, back to Brooklyn. Maybe the more times you hop from world to world, the more the line between them blurs. Maybe, someday, they'll come together.