C O N V E R G E

I hear the sirens wailing in the distance and its fairly cold outside for a night in California. Sometimes I love it here. Sometimes, it just feels redundant and old and too familiar to be anything but uninteresting. Knowing the streets without looking at the names leaves room for all kinds of inappreciativeness. You don’t really explore your own neighborhood for the sake of adventure, maybe to find a faster way to get to the freeway, but that’s all. I guess in a time like this where we’re always looking for directions and we’re hoping there are signs along the way to guide us, we want to find some kind of familiarity in every obscure moment. All of this land and air and clouds are just a back drop to the open roads and freeways that are begging to be driven on and onward. I’m becoming to think I have a nomad’s heart; wanting always to keep moving and never settling down. I find myself looking into my rear view mirror of my car, hoping that in it, I will see my home town and then eventually nothing but flickers of lights. Lights that belong to the streets I frequented as I made my way to the 60. I wish someday to find my place elsewhere and recall a time when I lived here and rustle up some memories of driving down the roads to see people raising goats in their front yards. Or maybe return here with my own family to show them where most of my youth was spent. I might not ever feel comfortable in any one location but that doesn’t bother me too much. There are so many cities to see, to take photos of, to fall in love in, to be apart of; I can hardly imagine it possible sometimes. So many people and so many possibilities. It’s something so absolutely wonderful to imagine as you sit comfortably in a town you could commute through with your eyes closed. It’s cold enough to wear a coat, I wish it’d stay this way forever. I wish the houses on the block a few down would keep their Christmas lights up for a few extra weeks. I drive past them so fast sometimes and I forget they’re up. “I’ll stop next time and take a stroll down one of the streets” I’ll say, but I’ll end up taking it all for granted like I do, next thing you know its early January and they’re all turned off and put away into labeled boxes in the garage. Let’s stop just this moment and go see the lights in our coats. We’ll miss them in January, I am almost certain.