I went home this weekend for my niece’s high school graduation. I went alone—I needed a break, and I missed my family and wanted to have time with them as a daughter/sister/aunt. I am forever & everywhere a mama, but I needed to be just…a kid from a small town that grew up, I guess.
The amount of emotion and nostalgia surprised me. I suppose the mind drifts less in it when I am home with my partner and daughter. There isn’t time. Since turning eighteen, I’ve lived mostly elsewhere so visits were common, returning—a regular occurence. Occasionally, there were places I liked to drive by—often needing a visual representation of time passing. Oh look, the house on Yankee. Roof shingles evolving from coal to moss. At some point, the house next door is torn down. The house where my old neighbor Jo lived. Jo used to play her radio super loud on her top floor balcony snapping fingers and talking to herself. Sometimes you drive by where things used to be and there’s just empty space.
I haven’t felt small town nostalgia in quite some time. Seeing my niece graduate was surreal and amazing. Her speech made me cry. Those kids were so stoked. The superintendent was once my high school principal and my brain couldn’t process his fading silver hair. There were some old classmates of mine in the stands, watching their own children graduate. Other people have an immediate habit of unveiling the passage of time. Of course the guy’s hair is gray. Mine is too.
Shell of an old love’s house. Shoot, if walls could gossip. Spot of my first job renovated into something unrecognizable. Buildings of my youth where all the apartment complex kids played tackle football and took polaroids upside with our hands in the air. The one guy who demanded we insult him every time he was at bat and I swear to god every time we obliged, he smacked the ball far enough for a group of us to go pluck-stepping through a high grass & thick-stalked field to find it.
There is the first house remembered—it used to sit at a dead end punctuated with a seemingly endless cornfield. Along the way they plowed through it’s gut and unfurled a new leg of pavement, and the first house was no longer at the end but just something in the middle with different colored shutters and a new fence. A backyard with a rap sheet of slip & slides and poison ivy.
I keep driving.
Parts of town I could navigate backwards in my sleep become bent and faded and different. The smoke shop where I bought my Djarums swallowed by revitalization. My old roommate isn’t alive anymore. The patch of grass we danced on is now so small. It was raining and we were drunk on wine, and it was definitely summer—booze heavy humidity and brief storm’s reprieve. I’ll never have that again. I don’t know if I would want it.
I did not expect the visit to be so emotional. I assume there will always be a touch of it. I am so much like my father, especially when I point to things that aren’t there anymore. Elephant of my memory will carry on. I drove hairpin turns on back roads with a fluency that never quite translates in the city. The silk of it crumpling. I drove in and out of old routes—this is where this is where this is where. This visit felt like a farewell. To what, exactly? I dunno. I sensed a new separation—or rather, I caught sight of what has been there for a while. This isn’t a bad thing. It is absolutely okay to feel farther away. It doesn’t mean you don’t care. Maybe distance allows us to love it. Maybe turning loose lets us keep it.
Let the rust, rust. Let your once favorite go-to thrift store now, years later, completely and irrevocably suck1. The one stoplight town is now turgid & bottlenecked, and the dead end is butchered into subdivision; the old NAPA Auto Parts building turned flower shop is for the moment vacant, and you aren’t where you came from but there are places nested in you. We are arriving and saying goodbye all of the time—ask any skin cell.
Talk about teacher of ultimate acceptance. A gutpunch. Oof.
Loooooved this.
Lovely musings 💜