Take me down to the paradise city.

They say you can't go home again. But I do. Regularly.

Well, not to my actual birthplace. There isn't anyone left in the land of Tastycakes and cheese steaks, so I don't get back to the City of Brotherly Love all that often anymore.

My parents still live in the house I grew up in and I live 10 miles from them now. Twice a week, my daughter sleeps in the bedroom I locked myself in - away from my family, the world and '80s-style peer pressure. The Depeche Mode, unicorn and INXS posters are all gone, though, as are the bunk beds and 50,000 stuffed animals I couldn't seem to part with until my mid-twenties.

Occasionally, I visit the place where I went to college. It's the same, but different and does nothing but make me feel jealous of the students who get to attend the school where I now send a donation check every year.

And then there's the place where I lived for a year after I graduated from college. It's hard for me to see it the same way I did then. My apartment building has been repainted (several times). There's now a Starbucks around the corner and more reasonable shopping within easy driving distance. I think I wouldn't mind living there now. 

That was a hard year and mostly because I don't like to live alone. (I'm the girl who slept with her bedroom light on for a month after viewing "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" at a fifth-grade slumber party and even longer after seeing "The Blair Witch Project" - and, yes, I know the "Blair Witch" is all fake. I know, I'm a wimp.) So when I woke up the first morning in my new apartment, hours before I needed to be at the office, I should have bounded out of bed and done the Mary Tyler Moore twirl in celebration of my exciting new career and all the places it would take me. New city, new job, new life and all that.

Instead, I was scared out of my mind when my eyes snapped open that morning to someone shouting, "Help me! Someone, help me! She's locked me in here. She's trying to kill me!"

That went on for about twenty minutes before I called 911 and a crew of nice officers came on over to investigate just what the heck what happening in the bathroom directly under my own. I was pretty sure the man in the apartment below mine was either: A. Seriously being held at knife point by an Angelina Jolie-like secret agent bent on gutting him by the toilet or B. Totally coked up beyond all reason and coming down off a delirious high on the linoleum of his bathroom floor, scaring the chit out of his brand-new upstairs neighbor. When I did pull myself together and left for work several hours later, I got a good look at the tenant who lived underneath me. He belonged in a Scorsese film right down to the sweaty Hanes Beefeater tank. Throwing out the crack pipe and a hot shower would have done wonders for that man. 

When Mr. Crackhead eventually moved out and a young couple moved in, I was relieved. But it didn't take long for my index finger to start getting cramps from the number of times I dialed the local police on those two. If he wasn't yelling, she was. If she wasn't throwing things, he was. And then it got really ugly. When he screamed, "Shut up, b*tch, you will do what I say" one early Saturday morning and she proceeded to cry, I threw up and called the police again. Later that day, Valentine's Day, Dr. X and I celebrated, not because it was the day of romance and flowers, but because the girl downstairs got a little "Good-bye Earl" on her boyfriend. I don't know exactly what happened, but she quickly moved out, he was nowhere to be (heard) seen, and I never saw them again. I have my theories.

Why didn't I move? Because I was in the good part of town! Uptown living at its finest.

Unlucky circumstances, certainly. But coupled with Cadillacs buried nose down in the dirt, more bad BBQ restaurants than I can throw a handful of potato salad at, and a constant driving wind that whips your mind numb - well, that place just isn't home anymore. I knew when it was time to move on.

I do miss the sky, though. It's not as big anywhere else, Amarillo by morning or otherwise.