I returned to Austin in a whirl of instruments, herbs, tapestries and books after a ten-year hiatus from the city of my birth. It had grown exponentially, but that was to be expected; it felt much bigger. I had been living in a camper van for 5 years, travelling along the west coast, playing music wherever would have me-- which on many evenings was simply the edge of the continent, singing for the whales and dolphins and sea lions of the Pacific Ocean. Other times, it was some loud beach bar, resplendent in red velvet and dirty wine glasses. I particularly enjoyed the house concerts, in fern-covered barns in Northern California, with some of the greatest songwriters I had the fortune and luck to stumble upon.

The 5 years before moving into the van, I had been living in New York City and I had never seen California. I didn’t know I was a songwriter when I lived in the city. I was an actor, working at plant stores and restaurants, doing background work and student films, running from one play rehearsal to the next, zipping underground at an exhilarating speed. I started a theater troupe, mostly made up of Texans from St. Edward’s University and Texas State University’s theater programs. We did plays we loved for people we loved in a new city for all of us.

Looking back, leaving New York was somehow really easy to do. I’ve heard people say that it’s hard to leave the city, that it grabs hold of you and keeps you within Its clutches until It says you are free to go.

I’d found an apartment in Queens and moved in with a 50-something-year-old Bulgarian stranger. It was early fall and I sat on my Kelly-green hardwood floor, drinking cheap red wine and unpacking one of my many boxes of books and plays. I imagined all the things I would say “yes” to in that city. People will tell you that New York makes a person hard, that one must construct walls around oneself and close up. I arrived in the city a complete open book; I looked everyone in the eye and couldn’t help gaping upward at the buildings and skyscrapers. Everyone I saw was interesting in some way. I’d walk around Manhattan, completely overstimulated, for hours, trying to piece together how a place like this could exist, has existed, will continue to exist.

Did the magic ever wear off? Did I close up like a good book? It’s possible that I learned to look down at the sidewalk when I made my way through the city. It’s likely I shed a few protective layers as I bathed in the golden rays of my first California sunset.

Looking back, leaving New York was somehow really easy to do. I’ve heard people say that it’s hard to leave the city, that it grabs hold of you and keeps you within Its clutches until It says you are free to go. My experience was based on a vague decision to get married and move into a camper van and I invited friends over to take/borrow/buy everything and anything in my kelly-green-floored-room. We drove over the Verrazano Bridge on Super Bowl Sunday headed west into another unknown. What I didn’t know then was that I wouldn’t act on stage again for the next 5 years.

Conversations with Austin Shakespeare

On Learning and Returning (Helyn Rain Messenger)