Phoenix, among homes, I would describe as the most normal. In my brain it has long been thoroughly normalized. The epitome of Arizona/Southwest/American living as I’ve experienced it. But it is also scrubbed of a distinctiveness that Tucson and even my drained Prescott hometown retain. The place is identifiable but also generic enough for me to resign it to a backdrop of total familiarity. Regardless of activity or era, the rhythms I find myself falling into here have felt exceptionally taken for granted. The roads I drive, the grocery stores I enter, the café havens in which I used to seek regular refuge are draped in neutrals. I have known no other form of this place. After returning from more colorful periods elsewhere it used to be a major pain point, a pothole of depression or at best a waiting-room feeling where all I could think to do was sit and pray for a change.
Tonight I wrote back to a kind soul from the past. An elementary school sweetheart who recently got in touch after 5 years of absence, probably 10 since we last properly spoke. She asked about these recent travels, an open-ended question without the history or context of all that’s happened since we both left our tiny town. Out poured descriptions with fountain-pen eagerness, as if Hungary and Serbia and the rest of Europe were mere mental doorways away, waiting to be opened when ready.
What in the world changed? The first time I came back to this desert I felt marooned, and now all is next-door, waiting.
We forget how highly negotiable the world is outside of what we are experiencing in a given moment. If you are at home then that’s where you are. If not, it doesn’t need to be far, seem far, leak energy from a constructed sense of loss or out-of-placeness. Whether it’s a door or universe away is up to you. The corollary is also gold: here I am, for instance, in Phoenix again, the old neutral place. This time—finally—I’m starting to see that there are worlds in it too. There are corridors I haven’t seen, emotional portals that spiral out into new sets of experiences. Perceiving new dimensions of this place I used to write off while juxtaposed with a new proximity of my heart’s kingdoms—Central Europe no longer being far—has lead to the surreal sensation of all places collapsing into one, connected by collapsed hallway where each room is accessed from any other, where the old illusion of physical distance has morphed into its more malleable emotional variant, where everything is here.
It’s been a little over a week since returning to Phoenix. There’s a soft waning glow now that I didn’t notice before. It lines the trees in golden hour and my dad’s bookcase from his reading lamp at dawn. The neutrals recede, replaced by color.