Sticky

You're right: I should have updated sooner. I mean, it's not like I'm actually doing much in Houston. I go to work, and then most of my evenings are kind of spent bumming around. I'll get dinner once or twice a week, go to the gym, but there's been plenty of time to update.

I'm glad I didn't, though. I wouldn't have wanted to be hasty about anything I wrote, hasty about assumptions or susceptible to falling into moods that might pass.

I've been down in Houston for about six weeks now, and the humidity is already warning me that I'm going to be a greasy, sweaty mess for at least half the year as long as I live here. Memories of three years in Florida, including my first two years of high school, swim in the back of my mind when I wake up and it's sort of mildly cloudy and damp. Tonight I came back from the gym and found a mosquito sitting on the outside wall of my apartment; thankfully, it wasn't nearly as big as the mosquitoes in Alabama, that sticky place I spent my senior year of high school.

Tonight I also finally started hanging pictures on my wall. It's to make my little apartment feel more like home and less a place I happen to sleep when I'm at work, ticking away hours between trips to Fort Worth.

I left Fort Worth after four years, the longest I've ever consecutively lived anywhere. The city was good to me—it gave me an education in college, when I was there for school but left at every chance to go home and be with Topper. It gave me a job, a career start, a place to let Topper live with the pony, an epicenter where my friends and eventually family would be. It gave me the love of my life (Dutch's burger, in case you were wondering . . . oh, and my guy, too). It gave me a place to really work on growing up.

The most peculiar thing about this move is that I'm going back. I've written before about how going back to places I've once lived is an extremely rare opportunity, which makes me often feel like my past is imaginary. I'm going back to Fort Worth frequently on weekends—my family, my friends, my soulmate (Topper) and the love of my life are all there. It's four hours up the road. I have a car, I have cash, I can return.

And it's almost as strange as never returning.

Every time I'm driving north on the highway that leads toward downtown Fort Worth, I have to check my mental state. Am I happy? Am I relaxed? Am I unnerved? Do I realize I don't live here any more? It doesn't matter that I'm not gone long enough to miss much, that I read the newspapers every day and most of my life is still there: I am not there. Not really. I am just a visitor.

I really like most of what I've seen of Houston so far. I'll delve more into my work, my neighborhood, all that stuff in the future, but I still haven't realized it's home. Maybe I'll somehow keep deluding myself that Fort Worth is still home, or maybe it's that place that I'll call home from now on. People will ask, Where are you from? and I'll answer, Fort Worth. Right now, I just say, I moved from Fort Worth. I don't claim it yet. But it looks like maybe I can, maybe I will.

It's hard to tell.