Reunion

It's like yesterday, now. She's smaller than I remember.

...

She's exploring her new environment, gradually. Rubbing herself against me. Settling in the windowsill. Everything I worked for, everything I sacrificed for - no thanks to *them*. No thanks to *California*.

The last chain binding me is severed.

I see the distaste for animals so many here have. Being turned away by apartment after apartment. This is the cost of your *diversity*. If there is a God, she no doubt frowns at my words.

But does that make them any less true?

I feel a calm I have not felt in a long time. But I feel also the knowledge, at the edges of my mind, of who has done this to me.

I'm leaving California. I'm heading back to the ancestral stomping grounds of Maine, in fact.

That is not to say this place has been without merits. Environmental justice. The acceptance of the LGBT. Oh, this place has its strengths.

But it's a festering, sunbaked sore. The heat is wretched and ungodly. The teeming urban masses are a blasphemy to my small town sensibilities. I had to call the sheriff's office a week or two ago because a couple of young hooligans were being threatening downtown. I don't even know who the sheriff back in Adams County is - but I do know the chief of police, on account of him being my 4th grade teacher's husband.

That's the small town life. I wasn't suited to this place, then or now.

But she's here now, and the semester is drawing to a close. I've done what I came here to do.

Look at her wondering eyes, as she looks out at the world beyond the window. Has she seen a place like this before?

And oddly, I see myself reflected in those eyes.