mendings

(written last weekend)

I’m back in my hometown to feed my sister’s cats while they are away. It’s a quick trip, but I’m managing time for friends and long curvy drives through open spaces. Every field I passed this evening danced with glowing slow-winks, a both temporary and constant glitter of lightning bugs. For the first time in who know’s how many years, I felt my heart leap as I turned past corn fields. Looks like the old skating rink is still a church, and the old tracks on Todhunter Road are still rough. An empty space remains where the ancient Amanda Elementary stood. My aunt’s old bar is now Taquiera Camarena. The UDF smells like ice cream and the car wash looks like an empty party with its neon blue after-hour lighting.

There is an ease and sweetness to returning—maybe it is because I am solo and have some time to soak up more of my old routes of nostalgia. I wanted so badly to get out of this place. I never felt like I belonged. I wasn’t wrong about that, but it wasn’t the fault of a town that was a town before I was even a person. I used to blame the town and its smallness. I cannot say for what exactly, but I needed something to point to, to want, that wasn’t what I had.

All this to say I do not hate where I’m from. As I get older I am starting to extend more grace to the run-over and written off. Some days I’d give anything for a backyard that poured into the illusion of an everlasting soybean field. I told my friend earlier today: “Man do I love a good cricket and train whistle in the middle of the night.” We are older, her and I. We are mothers and we are tired and we still get sillier with each passing hour. When it is time to leave it is hard to do. This brief visit feels replenishing, like Pittsburgh two weeks ago.

At the end of May, I traveled to Pittsburgh for a long birthday weekend—per usual, I did not do all that I wanted to do nor did I see everyone that I wanted. That said, I remained intentional about what I did allow time for. When I was people’d out, I had space to retreat and used no as a complete sentence. I made a point to give time to connections I want to put more effort into nurturing. There was a moment while sitting in Emma’s backyard with some sweethearts that I felt my entire body exhale. The sun felt incredible, the laughter raucous—the minutes going much too fast.

I am wildly lucky. I am grateful, and exhausted, which I suppose is longhand for some sort of satisfied. For so long it was many lives lived, as opposed to just my life—a singular, all-encompassing scrambler-coaster paddle boat dark ride.

There is a lesson in all of this returning. The two words minnowing in and out of the light: acceptance, forgiveness. Forgive young me for pinning all of my grievances on a place—accept I used it as lighter fluid and left as soon as I could. I followed my heart like scent lines from a windowsill pie—off my feet and drifting after. I accept this. And more than that, forgive myself for ever feeling bad about it. It is not a flaw.

Do no harm on a bad goodbye. The city I cut my twenties in—I never got the farewell right. Left before I was ready. After, I felt like I should whisper sorry every time I came through the Liberty Tunnel, spit out over the rivers shaking hands. Last month I walked by old haunts in awe—empty spaces I used to frequent, familiar corners—instead of wanting to apologize I felt an overwhelming love, a soft spot where I had slopped cement. The infrastructure of my sorrow snapped under the weight of this massive, undeniable adoration. The bones of all that ache & blame served well as kindling.

My hometown is so green right now. The roads into Middletown are and will most likely always remain shit—potholes like baby pools and broke off jaws. That train, that goddamn train, still stops then crawls then reverses then stops and we all turn around, cut around and up Yankee like a parade of so-and-so’s going somewhere. There are untitled buildings and rows of motor homes for sale just before the brewery. They put a flagpole where the waterpump stood. There used to be dead ends, everywhere.