Sometimes, for a tiny moment, I miss "home."

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back from San Diego to visit old friends in late September and October. We would return from various colleges and meet up to go to the Kern County Fair. I remember the heat, dry and stifling despite the Fall season, and the sun bronzing the skin of those of us in shorts and spaghetti straps. Fried food and copious amounts of butter filled the area with a doughy smell. Someone would be missing- they couldn't make it this year- girlfriends and boyfriends, jobs, new lives interfered. We'd reminisce on times when we lived closer and our lives were interconnected.

When my car drops over the peak of the mountain affectionately called the Grapevine and the farmlands appear as sprawling green and brown patchworks, the calm that comes with being "home" settles in. I can take my car out of low gear; the almond trees and alfalfa fields fade and become the city I ran away from. That's my Bakersfield; not rednecks and bad air and meth but Tule fog that delayed school buses for an extra couple of hours sleep, feeding blue-jays and picking persimmons from my Grandma's yard, and Basque food most people will never hear of. 

I see now that I've spent the greater part of the last decade trying to escape my hometown, I was looking at it as though it was deficient in some way and therefore less superior to San Diego. But, despite trying to ingratiate myself into San Diego culture and project myself as a San Diego transplant, I remain a Bakersfield woman at heart. What I miss about home is everything I find lacking in San Diego: a cohesive character, intimacy, the memories of my youth. People ask me where I'm from all the time; I don't appear to fit in as a San Diegan. I even talk like I'm from Bakersfield- the long drawn out A sound- I know comes from my father's side of the family. I didn't realize I talk "funny" until I left the place where everyone talks like me. 

Even when San Diego excited me most, even though there are parts I've still yet to see, even when going home to visit makes me hate that place because the Grapevine is closed due to snow, San Diego still doesn't feel like my new home or even second home. San Diego is still radiant- a paradise for which I pay premiums in real estate- but neighborhoods function in cliques and it is fragmented. I feel far away from those I wish to be close to. It seems to me that there is a potential place here for everyone; everyone but me, it seems.