A Cold Night In The Desert

ETA: 19:06 Friday

The cold air seeps through an open glass door at Winning Coffee on Central in Albuquerque as some kids from a local band drag amps, cables, and cords fumbling on the tile floor. Seems like nothing has changed from when I was 16. Kids with bad haircuts, tattoos unthoughtout and lack of pretension seem to be universals. What happened to me?
I am in Albuquerque, a strange name for a western town in the state of New Mexico. It has been a week since I slept in a Forrester rental car shared by Sau and our collective luggage. That night the cruel desert froze the car's metal shell with an icy grip that flowed through the windows, through our plastic sleeping bags, and under our skin. I woke up at 3 AM in a shiver, and I had to think about my own survival; something not often thought.
Home

Shelter is a basic human need, and it takes a lot of unlearning to get used to living without a basic human desire as such. Home is more than shelter. The word home suggests a much more encompassing connotation. I don't understand home as a certain physical place. I have lived places for long periods of time that I could not call my home. On the contrary I have lived certain places mere days that I could call home.

Cities can be a home. There are certain cities I feel a part of throughout the world. I feel a connection with Rome that entails to me a security that is not universal. For instance Barcelona doesn't give me the same feeling.

Albuquerque

I can't exactly wrap my head around how this city functions. I am ignorant in the city's history which as I piece together will hopefully afford me some kind of understanding of this place I want to call home. It is such an odd thing to go from the high fashion of Firenze, through the water soaked green of Hawaii and ultimately end up in a desert in the heart of the southwest all in a such a short amount of time.

Hawaii

There is a pier of rocks which lead into the sea in front my family's home in Kaaawa. About three weeks ago I stood at the water's edge gazing out past the waves breaking on the first reef and into the seemingly infinite horizon. I thought the same thoughts that I imagine Vespucci, Magellan, and many other men have thought in times since. " How the hell did I end up here?" Vespucci in Italian after his arrival in America, and Magellan in his many routes.
I looked out and couldn't understand how I had been driving in a car on a pitch black street in Taranto Italy while waves of snowfall broke on the windshield as I rushed to board a train at 10:57, only a week previous. When time doesn't make sense anymore and distance can be so easily mashed it becomes more than astonishing. I wondered how an airplane could find such a miniscule speck on a map, and get there so fast without fault.

There is no distance anymore. Rejoice.