Roots Before Branches

Six

When I was six years old, the meadow behind my house was fluorescent; beaming from the summer's light. It was reminiscent of the neon pinks of Las Vegas, so my father said. For something so natural, it was hard to believe a manufactured city came to mind. I never did appreciate the everlasting trickle of a river's flow, or the songs sung by the gulls and geese above.

There was never anything special about that, I would tell myself.

When I was thirteen years old I moved to New York City for the first time. Obnoxious businessmen, screeching yellow cab horns and narrowed city streets replaced the memories I once had of what I knew to be home. Worlds apart, I felt split in two. One half of me danced with my friends among the flora until I was called in for dinner by my mother while the other soaked his favorite sneakers in a Manhattan puddle on Seventh Avenue.

There was never anything special about that, I would tell myself.

When I was eighteen years old I returned to the meadows with a skyline state of mind. I was transfixed on the fleeting; constantly on the go. College had started that autumn and I was singled out by my own thoughts. You hate it here. You're alone. Leave. Get out. I hate to admit it but I listened to their blasphemy for nine months. I didn't make a single friend in my first year. I was one soul bound to two landscapes.

There was never anything special about that, I would tell myself.

And, now, I am twenty one years old; on the cusp of a cap and gown. I've measured my happiness over the last three years through the amount of friends I had, the amount of money I had, the amount of it I had. There was never anything special about that. Now I measure my happiness through my emotions; my state of being, as I've come to the conclusion that I am just as much the six year old making friends with caterpillars and worms in the fields as I am the young man grappling with the light speed of a cosmopolitan cityscape.

And there's something special about that, I tell myself.