Feels Like Home

Lying in the dry, dead grass, late on a chill but sunny day. The first of March, I realize, watching clouds drift by above me; and below me, miles and miles of open, flat land. Like a desert. A desert where whithered yellow runs forever, melting together with bright blue sky on the horizion, and the pale sun is the warmest thing I can touch or feel.
Neighborhoods flash by like pictures, bleeding by me like a blur of memories I can barely recall. Something happened. Once. Something that just slightly creeps in from the corner of my mind, like the sun rising over the earth, light falling across the moon.
I don't know when I fell in love with this city. I don't know how or why; such a cold thing, this city. So dirty and uncaring, so unlikely to forgive. Here, I must always have my eyes open, constantly watching, for if I shut them, even more a moment, this place will fold in around me, enclosing me in darkness, danger and fear. And yet there is nowhere on earth I'd rather be. This city is my friend, my family, my home. Most of all that I love or want resides here; it is a place of dreams and indescribably desires. A place to start a new life.
I turn onto my side, grass clinging to my clothes, twined through my hair, and I can see it in the distance. A hazy, gray block on the horizon, skyscrapers jutting into the blue, stabbing it. Reminding the rest of the world of how the west was won.

Flash forward one hour; we're cruising past leafless trees with rough, colorless bark; I see images, moving so quickly it's like they're running by me, rather than me rushing through them. I see children playing in the street, men walking dogs, women pushing strollers. I see drug pushers and hobos and businessmen with tidy suitcases and sharp suits. And the blood pounds in my veins, just to hear the music and remember, and to know that there's nothing like friendship.
There's nothing like freedom on a Monday afternoon when all the kids are in school; nothing like just being with somebody-the best friend you didn't know existed-and talking and relating and simply being real. Simply being there for one another. Something about it takes me back. I don't know what it is about this day, but something makes me remember other days, long gone by, when life was simpler, and I was younger, and all life's opportunities were just hovering out their, like fat, red apples just waiting to be plucked. Something feels like home.

Now the sun is setting in the west, ducking down behind far-off buildings and sinking into white-capped mountains. I'm sitting beside you, and I'm not sure I've ever felt like this before. Whatever this feeling is, I don't want it to go away. I don't want to wake tomorrow and find that these emotions we're sharing fled with the stars. Because I like this. The way it feels to have you beside me, against me, the warmth of your hands, the brush of your nose. Even when I close my eyes I can still taste you, hear your boyish laugh in my ear. And I've never felt so small, so delicate, so feminine. I've never felt so beautiful.
Maybe some day, that feeling will disappear. It might fade into the morning. But come what may, there shall never be something more romantic to me than listening to you breathe beneath the Denver sun, and stretching out on the grass in your arms. For now there is only this memory, and only this hope for tomorrow and the day that follows.
There is only a wildly beating, girlish heart that reaches out with inexperienced fingers to grasp smooth leather, and holds on tightly, until the sun is gone.