if you had told me then, i would not have believed you....

about once a week, in a random moment, i find myself reviewing the geography of my life over the last five years. like, for instance, how in may of '99, i was SO over this town. it seemed fortuitous, then, that salimah and i, after both feeling led to move to gaithersburg to become part of a church, packed up all our belongings and left baltimore (i thought, perhaps, for good). and then, by summer of that same year, how i had already started to feel the pit in the center of my stomach, fearing a bad decision had been made. but in my stubbornness, i refused to believe this and pushed forward with my dream of fitting in at this place and finding a husband there and settling down with our children for the rest of our lives.

and how i was some degree of unemployed for months on end. and how we had no food in the cabinets and how it was a LITERAL miracle that my bills got paid.

and how, even after two full years of trying to make things work - even after getting decent jobs and a better place to live - everything still felt wrong.

and so, after three years of what now to me feels like exile, we returned to charm city (whether or not for good, who knows). and my lungs opened up and let me breathe again.

it is no wonder to me that every time i drive back into monty county, i begin to feel a kind of sick washing over me. it is not that i regret leaving baltimore the first time. i think that, ultimately, it had to happen for a LOT of other things to be brought about in my life. and for that, i am immeasurably grateful. but still, if i am being honest, i will admit that there are a lot of experiences that i had down there that i would, if i could, take back and erase from my memory. and in my heart, i do not ever want to live there again.

but today, i will drive there with salimah to meet up with two of the small handful of pleasant memories that came out of that experience. and then later, i will return to the one home i really feel i have at this point. and i don't just mean my apartment. my life is here. my heart is here. even in uncertainty, i want to be here. at least for now....