The desert never leaves me.

I've never seen a spring as lovely as this one. The sun is shining every day, the flowers are so abundant you can smell them on the wind, and there are robins everywhere you turn. The Hyde Park parrots are nesting outside my apartment. Spring-- a real spring, with bulbs and blooms and birds-- is not a San Francisco phenomenon, and I love it.

Yet I am terribly, debilitatingly, homesick. Third year burnout, perhaps, but all I want to do is sit outside Cafe Roma in North Beach, drinking lattes and reading poetry. I want to walk miles along Ocean Beach in the rain. I want to work in my garden. I miss High School, of all things: I want to go back to Urban, sit on the Gumption stage, and write plays. I want to fold origami cranes in Charis' office and talk to Munaf about love and life and wooden mammoths. I owe LeRoy a letter about History and God, and Jonathan an e-mail about... everything.

Four years ago I was in the California desert with my classmates, bouldering in the "Cavern of Doom". I still remember how scared I was as I got to the top, Jesse spotting, and the exhilaration of coming out on top as the moon rose in the sky, the shadows of the Joshua trees bowing to greet her.

Janicke asked me to write something for the talent show, and so I did; a monologue which began (and I still remember), "Jessica and I had our hearts set on learning how to fly. Although she loved dogs and I lived for animals of an equine persuasion, we were both birds inside."

Climbing the Cavern of Doom, I knew how. I didn't need anyone else to hold me up.

How can I be weaker now than I was then?

If this were a poem (of my mother's school), it would be called

I used to know how to fly./The desert never leaves me.