You can’t go home again. That’s what they say. Which is weird, because the truth is that you never really leave. Regardless of how many years or miles pass by, there’s always a part of you trapped in that place. A splinter of home is forever lodged in your psyche.
Home is a complicated thing. It isn’t just a place. I’m not talking about those corny plaques that everyone’s grandma has hanging in their kitchen that says something like, “Home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling.” Or even worse, “Home is where the heart is.” That’s all too simple and trite. Especially if you’ve had many homes.
One of those places wasn’t my home at all. I never lived in Boulder, Colorado. And yet, I’ve long had a thorny relationship with the place.
Curled up on the floor of my cramped bedroom in a little trailer park in Indiana, I drew one enormous picture after another of mountain scenes with my fat Crayola markers. I did this because I was stoked and couldn’t contain my excitement. As soon as the school year ended and I finished 3rd grade, my mother and I would meet up with her ex-boyfriend, Mike, who had moved to Colorado, so he could rescue us from her current boyfriend. We drove day and night for a few days and early in the morning of the last day, I looked out the windshield from the backseat at the foothills looming in front of us. My jaw dropped. A REAL MOUNTAIN RIGHT FUCKING THERE. It was as though my imagination had the power to turn shitty drawings into massive structures of rock and pine trees, only more vivid and massive than I could have dreamed. I felt like I was where I belonged. I never felt that way in Indiana. Everything there just felt… off.
We went to see Mork & Mindy’s house, where I was sure the cast actually lived because I was 8 and didn’t understand how TV worked. That first day in Colorado, it was clear that Boulder was a magical place. Even better, I would get to live in this wonderland. Happily ever after and shit.
Until later that day, when the spell was broken. Looking back, I think the city intimidated my mother. In later years, I would observe how big, busy places sent her into raging tirade mode. That day, she became ill-natured, complaining to Mike that she wanted to go to the next town over. Longmont. We hadn’t seen Longmont, but she insisted we go there. So we did.
That was August. By Christmas, we’d lived with Mike’s sister, a motel room, an empty house, a one-bedroom apartment with my mom’s friend, and finally, a new boyfriend’s house. I didn’t like any of it, but was still glad to be in Colorado. Although… I never stopped wondering about the life I’d be living if we’d stayed in Boulder that day.
It was so easy to get into trouble as a teenager in the 80s. Especially living with a single alcoholic mother who was distracted by her own issues. A couple of my friends had found a group of party people in Boulder. Believing that cool things happened in Boulder and lame shitty things happened in Longmont, I went along for the ride a few times. Something inside me still saw Boulder as a place that held the potential I had been robbed of that very first day. So, I went to Boulder with my friends. We got rides there. We hitchhiked. Took the bus. Anything to escape Longmont for a while. I got drunk and dropped acid. Smoked weed and scarfed down shrooms. I stumbled along the Pearl Street Mall, wandered off into some trees and had weird hallucinations. Those adventures were very adolescent and extremely hilarious. The kind of teenage shenanigans you laugh about years later when reuniting for adult dinners and beers.
However, it was only a matter of weeks before Boulder became a place of punishment. Being a juvenile delinquent isn’t all wacky fun times and psychedelics. It’s also sad nights in a detox center, long hours in courtrooms, and lonely days in the juvenile detention center. All of which was in Boulder. The phrase “going to Boulder,” no longer meant a party. It meant handcuffs and a cell. My friends continued to go to Boulder for fun, but I hated the place and rarely went back unless I had to.
Boulder represented an alternate reality taken from me; a utopia I had invented in my mind that did not and could not exist. A place where my friends belonged and I didn’t. A punishment.
Then it just became a place to pass through on the way to somewhere else.
Distance matters. Time changes everything. Travel alters perspective. Staying too close to anything for too long is poison. I moved away from Longmont. Out of Colorado. Out of the U.S. completely. I lived abroad for a few years, explored various corners of Europe and then, almost 30 years after seeing my first mountain, I returned to Boulder. This time, as a tourist.
I wasn’t in the backseat of my mother’s car or a police car. I was with my husband and our friend.
Freed from expectations and dread of punishment, I was free to wander like a big dork on a guided tour of the Celestial Seasonings factory. Enjoy my lunch at Falafel King on Pearl Street Mall as if I were an outsider exploring a strange, new territory. Because that’s exactly what I was. Boulder was now just another city. I had no strong feelings about it one way or the other. Although, it seemed smaller than I remembered.
Occasionally, I still wonder who I might have been had my mother not complained in the car that day. It’s one of many roads not taken to ponder. Boulder is not the place that lives in my memory. I never really got to know her. And yet, she holds a piece of me. The piece that tells stories about teenagers hitchiking to Boulder, running amok on the mall, and getting into trouble. I get it now. That alternate reality was never taken from me.
I just had to wait a while, then write it myself.
