The Sun Also Sets

This photo shows yesterday's sunset.
Today's however, which unfortunately I didn't have a camera during, was even more radiant. Today's sunset was perhaps one of the most beautiful sights I've seen in some time.
The sun hung low and full and the soft gold glow that burned around it pierced through a sky of coral and mauve. Beauty almost burned the irises of my eyes as I stood, mouth agape, staring into the face of nature and magic and beauty and God.
The sunset was unspeakably moving. I was so mystified by its brilliance that, as I walked to my car in the parking lot of a downtown shopping center, it took a good while before I realized it blazed directly over the facilities of a large, cold, neighborhood Wal Mart SuperCenter.
Perhaps I'll always be a person who looks for meaning in places where it doesn't actually exist, and perhaps that makes me sad, but I was struck in that moment by how perfectly this sight illustrated my relationship with the town that I grew up in. The sunset was so vibrant, a sight I would have missed had I been anywhere else, and I was able to appreciate this fact. But at the same time I knew that the beauty I was witnessing in the sky didn't belong in these surroundings. This sight should not exist above a Wal Mart. Yet the Wal Mart wasn't going anywhere. Its place in this town seemed as permanent as hatred. The sun had no choice but to blaze above it, out of place and fading.
Now, I'm certainly not saying that I in any way represent this sun. Neither am I saying that this Wal Mart SuperCenter in any way represents the many diverse and phenomenally interesting lives that fill my hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas. To say anything of that nature would be all at once ridiculous and wholly incorrect.
All I'm saying is that the sun was there, as was the Wal Mart and as was I. And just as the sun moved from one place high in the sky to another farther and farther away, in that moment the awareness made itself clear that the time had come for me to move on as well.
I returned to the town where I was born, the place that illustrates every definition of the word "home." I've refreshed every fiber of my being. And sadly I just don't fit.
It's awful to think that a person can be surrounded by the people who mean more to him than anyone on Earth: friends, family and near strangers who are more supportive than humanly imaginable, and still he can know that this is not his life.
I came into the world destined to move onto something else. A land far, far away that holds the potential for great success and even greater failure. A land where I am essentially alone but where I can live and survive, carving a small place for myself. All the while knowing, deep inside the heart that beats beneath my chest, that I am where I need to be.