Southwestern sun embraced me like an old flame that’s still burning, in that warm-and-abrupt-and-disorienting sort of way. It’d been a year since we were first acquainted on a blind date at George Bush Intercontinental Airport; we fell hard-and-fast for each other during a week-long escapade in which I found my first love, adventure. We parted ways bittersweetly and I returned to the East Coast in the name of academia, while Houston earnestly begged me to return and finish what we’d started, tugging my heartstrings until, finally, the ache of long-distance was more than I could bear. So I moved in. Ink still damp on my high school diploma, my suitcases and I set off for our summer home — a stuffy three-bedroom apartment shared with another dozen-or-so millennials drawn with a similar urgency. We were seasonal interns with the same nonprofit, teaching English as a Second Language by day and falling more in love with our grand mosaic of a city by night, sunset by sultry, pictorial sunset. My class was full of darling women from Africa and the Middle East, refugees thrust into a concrete jungle filled with foreign sights and sounds, trying their damndest to maneuver through this new hemisphere sans a map. So there we were — a little Persian-Congolese-Afghani-Kurdish-Iraqi-American hodge-podge wading cross-cultural waters and shoring up common ground week by week. They learned the English translation for their favorite color; I learned the color of friendship has countless beautiful translations. They learned how to navigate an American grocery store; I learned I have a deep-and-passionate affinity for Mediterranean cuisine. As fate would have it, the lunar calendar turned its page to Ramadan — the Islamic month of fasting — in the middle of my stay, proposing dozens of opportunities to dine with my beloved compadres, who welcomed me into their homes with open arms and a kiss on both cheeks (a cultural custom). I’d kick off my shoes at the door (another cultural custom) and promptly obey when instructed to “Sit here, Teacher Rachel,” vivifying my palette with dolma and lamb kebabs and Ceylon black tea. I’d return to my apartment and nap for hours after, full not just from my blissful gluttony, but from all the beauty I’d stumbled upon in all the places I never guessed I’d find it. Full, because the Houston I know isn’t some insomniac metropolis flecked with skyscrapers and roadways perpetually under construction yet seemingly unimproved (although we’ve been very well acquainted). We know one another far more intimately than that, having traded secrets and bared our souls in all their grime and glory, coming to grips with one another’s very bests and worsts. The Houston I know is quirky, vibrant, a collection of sights and sounds and aromas scrawled into a red spiral-bound notebook and indelibly etched into my memory. The Houston I know is varnished with temples and mosques and Technicolor linens draped over balconies to dry in a matter of minutes. Houston smells like incense and rice-and-beans cooking over open fires in the courtyard; tastes like the baklava and beef shawarma at Droubi’s on the corner of Hillcroft and Evergreen; sounds like Bollywood music blaring from the shops in Little India and the lyrical, melancholic quaver of the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer. Houston was a sort of pilgrimage for me, a coming-of-age journey that stretched the perimeters of my comfort zone in every imaginable way, imparting powerful lessons about the inner workings of the world and myself. It was wonderfully chaotic, beautiful and transformative. Those are the journeys that stay with you, that (with permission or without it) change you for better or for worse, but largely for the better. Those are the journeys you find yourself musing on long after you’ve migrated to the next ones; because whether you were ready or not, they were ready for you. Thank goodness. It’s been nearly six years since I last felt Houston’s sultry breath upon my skin, but the flame still burns as hot as it did back then. Perhaps someday I’ll feel that familiar tug on my heartstrings, that same urgent invitation to pack my bags for one more summer fling.