Sydney says, “That’s so LA,” because I turned down the wine and told her I’d taken a gummy instead. The train hums under us, a long, soft note I can feel in the roof of my mouth. I am slightly outside my own life. The windows flicker with Vermont in slices: drought-thinned leaves, their color pulled tight, the gold breaking into rust. My ringed fingers catch the light—ruby flare, sapphire flash—brief glints against the blur of trees. Pasture rolling out, the Green Mountains to one side. The Adirondacks across the distance. Farmland split by low stone walls, red barns still holding.

I was raised on space. On hay-thick air and a quiet that startled me clean. That silence had weight. LA gave me a different geometry—all angles and reflections, a city built on want. The landscape slides by, unchanged and changed. The green is thinner now, less saturated than I recall, as if the volume has been turned down. Still, the edges of the trees glow—electric—my body answers before I can stop it: home.

I know, without saying it out loud, that I could never stay. Two weeks here and I will start pacing, like the weather might leave me stranded. Maybe home is always the place I’m not in. But when the train takes a curve and the fields open wide, the old longing rises. I still believe in a dirt road with no witnesses, a place where I could step off the train and dissolve into the version of me the land remembers.

Bio: Rebecca Simone Schmitz