Today I sit at my kitchen table, bathed in the yellow light of morning. This garden. This view. This will be behind me soon. Tomorrow I will get in my car with my daughter and head west.
This is my last quiet morning in the sun bathed kitchen. Soon a simple step out the door will not bring those majestic, 14,000ft peaks into my view. It's time to leave. And this is okay.
I didn't give Salida the chance I probably should have. This was, instead, a rather dark time. It was a long winter. It was a community that I just couldn't fit into. It was my own apathy, my own lack of trying, my own you-have-to-keep-it-together sense of survival. It was my own journey to a more dark place in life, and a pervasive fear that I wouldn't be able to crawl out of the darkness. It was a sense of isolation, real and imagined.
One could say I gave up, that I never really gave this place a chance. They wouldn't be wrong. But sometimes no matter how many times you reposition the clothes the bottom line is they just don't fit. Salida was the buffer that we needed to get out of Denver, a city that did us well, that we grew in as people and as a family. Friends we will cherish forever. Salida became the gray out of the black, the ease of the shock that living in California will be. I think I actually called this out before we ever even moved here.
Oh Colorado. I will miss you. You are a part of me now. My marriage, my daughter, my family, all borne out of this state. Those mountains. The long, arduous treks to the tops of 14000ft peaks. The utter exhaustion. The grand sense of accomplishment. The retreat into the woods, onto the rocks, into the sun. The wrinkles from the incredible dryness. The photographs, the thousands and thousands of photographs. It was all too beautiful to fully capture. The lesson of standing still and letting the beauty wash over you, knowing that you simply can not contain it.
My future will hold a deep melancholy for Colorado. But I was bourne and raised along an ocean. It's time to go home. I did what I came here to do.
