A petrifying paradox plagues the ambitious small-town native,
Who is so filled with love for her home and yet has no greater desire than to leave it.
Standing in her yard (Or is it a forest?), dandelion stems and dark soil between her bare toes,
Starlight swallows her like the bulbs of a blazing marquee printed with celestial showtimes;
Cricket song choruses in her eager ears, echoes of a creeping and crawling city;
Maple trees scrape the sky with soft splinters—forever growing, never reaching.
She is doomed, she thinks, for a life of striving for the future and longing for the past.
She may never roam so far that the green peaks of her mountainous cradle escape her view.
Though, perhaps, there lies comfort in such a curse.
Her childhood home sits upon the edge of a tectonic plate,
Where earth slipped away to carve the cliffs over which her sun rises each dawn.
To grow up is not to grow apart: that knowledge reassures her, in a restless sort of way.
Glaciers, creatures, and people leave valleys, trails, and footprints in our wake.
We move onward, over land and life, with direction not limited to a simple forward or back.
Between scarlet leaves and against blushing cheeks, the well traveled wind whispers, Return.