Hometown Prose

Dorothy knows best.

Familiar sites are often the best vacations. They take you to safe places. Release you. Relieve you. Revive you. You don’t have to think in the familiar. No worries. And it is O.K.! It is entirely okay. It’s not every minute that you hear waves lapping and remember laughing with your father as a child. It is not every day that you breathe salty air and feel comforted. It is not even every week that you feel a spray on your cheeks. It is when you travel to the familiar. It is when you let go, because you know you don’t have to hold on. At least not for right now.

Even from the opposite coast… if I close my eyes… I could trace the skyline with my fingertip: ocean, sand, palm tree, broadwalk, Hollywood Beach Resort, Bandshell, parking lot, ’63 Thunderbird, daddy, brother, me.

Trace the familiar. Retrace the familiar. Live the new. Revive the old within the new. Reimagine the old. Reimagine the future. Breathe in an ocean, exhale a sea. You are exactly where you must be, but not where you must stay. And if you need to, in order to keep moving forward, revisit the familiar.

There’s no place like home.

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