No need to kill the fatted calf. Milo's will do...

It still doesn't feel completely real.
Almost as though it were a waking dream, a miasma of images and feelings of familiarity through which I am simply floating...
But a strange sense of renewed whole-ness grounds me, anchors me to the fact that it is real.
I am home.
These are my streets.
These are the paths and routes I have known and taken a thousand times before...
And yet now, as I drive them, as I walk them, they are different. They have not lost their connection to my spirit, not enough time has passed for that, but the character of their beauty has been refreshed. I am reminded why I do still love the city so. Every city is an organism, a living, breathing, pulsating creature that grows and responds according to the entities that inhabit it. I am beginning to feel its heartbeat again. It is a comfort, and yet still so strange, so distant. I am not quite in synch yet.
We were less than an hour out of these borders when the first sense of home cascaded through my senses...
The sun had just set, and for the first time in a long time I saw the silhouetted outlines of our rolling hills.
I realized how much I have missed this simple, somehow breath-taking vision. (Raleigh is a very flat landscape).
That night, I heard the trains.
I had missed the sound of trains bellowing through a still, quiet night. That one sound alone defines the simple, unseen connections I have to this organism...
To the city.
I have missed the people that I love. I have seen many of them at this point, and it will be hard to dismiss that sense of belonging from now on.
These ARE the people whom I love. And I am glad to be beside them once again.
This city is home again, for now.
I can re-intigrate, re-establish, re-connect at my leisure...
But I can also simply re-explore.

I am home.
I cherish the distant echo of a train's cry.
I stare back into the starlit sky I have known so well,
the light of Orion's belt showering the city softly on a spring evening.
I await with great anticipation the sounds of tree frogs cavorting through a balmy summer night. And the cicadas with their replacement symphonies on a balmy summer day.
I await the smell of honeysuckle and freshly mowed lawns.
I am once again surrounded by great, tree-covered hills...
and a shimmering city that sits nestled in their valleys.
I am home.
And there is still much to do.