A Bud is Born

January 3^rd, 2010

While life in one part of the nation was certain and confined, one place offered hope. The American West is many things, and for early Americans it was the unknown, adventure, and dreams. Later, it would promise more eastern Americans hope for riches of metal born from rock by water to iron sieving pans into the pockets of peasant’s pants to their deliverance into their capable dreams, free from the finite power of their hands and heritage.

For me the West offered as much, but without the need of deliverance. It promised a new life; not from one forlorn, but built upon—one was succeeded by the former as a change in season. It left me not disappointed and destitute as it did many seeking riches but rather with a life that had come into its own—and it came quickly in regard to its social and personal being. The dream sought for and promised never materialized even through great toil and perseverance. In spite of this, life was entertained by the generosity of my family, to a point. Because of this, I left to seek an old calling in a new avenue. The dream was shattered like so many others of the 1870s except that my heart didn’t die with the burned dream; it smolders in sweet surrealism.

This second life has been the opposite of the first. While riches are now regularly deposited, life has been void. A house in the middle of no where—yet still in the city limits; a roommate who is both friend and foe; a car that must be driven for the most basic necessities by lack of public transportation; with the roommate’s sudden departure and divorce, a loneliness filled only by pets; separation from happening; a list of friends that stops at two; aimlessness and lack of physical fitness; lack of volunteering and religious community. I thought this life would bloom by December. Instead it started ill and remained stagnated—until now. The bud is born and the promise of the bloom is close to actualization. Let this bud last and come into its color.

Others’ dreams have gone on to bear fruit on the eve of my departure in a way only meant to say--ever so politely--it was not meant to be. By them may I some day return to the West with that same dream on a sturdier wagon and trail? Or perhaps in a rush of another kind?