Home again, home again...again

When you live abroad for almost four years (and are admittedly horrible about keeping in touch with your hometown acquaintances) it's a natural phenomenon that you should return to find yourself depleted of friends and family to visit. Through the years that I was gone, my own list of contacts in the Emerald City dwindled considerably, and not necessarily for the worse; our three-day weekend in Seattle was a wonderful reconnection with those few individuals who do remain close to my heart. When I was 25 you could not have convinced me that fewer friends and social engagements would be desirable much less survivable - but here I am almost a decade later, the polar opposite of my previous social-butterfly self. Perfectly content to stay at home, living our new small-town life...not a stitch of boredom to account for.

Our recent trip to Seattle brought back many of those ancient feelings, albeit briefly; the need to be all wrapped up in other people, places, and things; the idea that the self isn't nearly enough without accessories and a million friends to show it all off to. The strictly metropolitan notion that a life lived faster is somehow better. But once that momentary lapse of reason had passed it also cemented for me the knowledge that I am once and for all a wholly different person. Changed completely, and not necessarily for the worse, either, I'd like to believe.

Now, as we plan yet another quick trip to Seattle (for Hamid's PHP engineer certification!) I understand that the city itself is also changed for me forever. No longer the mythical place of my leaving or something for which I yearn, it is simply the storyboard where all the life I lived before played out - nothing more, nothing less. Granted, one of the most beautiful places on the planet...but with a travel map now dotted by memories in hundreds of cities across the world Seattle fades into just another been-there-done-that - filed among the photographic postcards I've collected during my travels.