The Corner

6 years.

6 YEARS. I don't really know how it happened. I met him by accident. I was in love with someone else at the time, or at least I thought I was. My entire universe was about 50 square miles. The same people, the same sounds, the same mistakes. Everyone knew everything about everyone - but suddenly I had a secret. It was born of a desire to escape, although I didnt really know what that meant at the time.

At first I was just whoever I felt like pretending to be. Then I was who I thought I wanted to become. Then I was who I thought he wanted me to be. Finally, I was just...me. And yet he was still there. And he was 11000 miles away. And he was different. And he felt like home.

6 years later and I'm driving home from the job I thought I was supposed to have. That's life right? Grow up and get an office job. Deny yourself and abandon your teenage ideals. Wear a pencil skirt and learn excel. He tells me this is silly. He tells me we're supposed to grow up to be happy.

As I crest the gentle rise just before the corner of the street I've built a home on, driving on the "wrong" side of the road, I stop my car. Sometimes I get out, sometimes I just roll down the window. Sometimes I pick flowers for him. Tonight I get out and stand in a wide open space, so far from the cramped and chaotic life I had when we first met. I take in the gentle breeze through the long grass and the brilliant clouds lit low by a sun sinking behind a broken down barn. That sun will soon rise over a city skyline to wake up almost everyone I have ever known. Back home.

6 years on and now I'm not sure if I have two homes or none.

As I watch, I hear a gentle swish, separate to the wind in the grasses. Out of the broken down barn, against a backdrop of deep indigo and eye watering fuschia, just before the black bats start to empty out of the hill to the south, flies a mass of soft white and tan. An owl, out to hunt the field mice and the rabbits and all the other prarie creatures I have somehow come to share a life with. 6 years ago it was rats and pigeons. This has become my favorite corner, right down the street and 11000 miles from home, and suddenly a memory resurfaces.

Standing on the porch of my grandparents house. A house built by the generations of my mothers family that wanted to escape the hustle and bustle. A house in the country. We only went 2 weeks or so out of a year - less as I got older and my interests narrowed to my city life. It was a country of deep dark woods and large calm lakes, so different from the vistas I am now looking at...and yet there I was all those years ago, waiting for the bats to fly out of the woods as the sun set, and from somewhere behind me a large white and tan owl had swooshed overhead, startling me.

For a moment the two countrysides exist side by side. The corner and the porch. The young and the old. The street and the 11000 miles. The bats and the barn owls.

I get back in my car with a few little purple flowers in my hand to give to the man who wants me to grow up to be happy.