2003-07-16 - 2:33 a.m.

'"this is the part of me that loves my parents"'

Today I was going through this huge box of old pictures in my house and came across one I'd never seen before. It was of my mom standing in from a sign that read 'Welcome to Austin.' And for some reason, at seeing this, I felt my lungs release a breath I didn't even realize I was holding in. I breath I'd probably been holding since I decided to leave Albuquerque. And that stale trapped air came rushing out of me like the release of something dark, something uncertain. And suddenly I felt myself relax somehow. In this knowledge that my mom had been where I am going.

And I don't know when it was. Or why it was. And I guess I don't really care. The technicalities are just that. They're technical. They're small. While the important thing is that at some point during her life, she lived there. Was alive there. Even if it was just for the amount of time that it takes to change airplanes at an airport. Even if it was just a single heartbeat of time. My mom was in Austin. And soon I will be, too.

And I don't know why for sure, but that seems important.

It seems strange that since I decided to make my move into Austin, I've been finding all of these tiny little hints of it scattered throughout the stacks of my past. Old scraps of paper saved for no good reason at all. Random pictures taken at unexplained times. All of which, as I look at them now, seem like the hardest shove I ever managed to ignore. All piled up and pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle, they make it seem so obvious. Austin. Why did I never think of it before?

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