Home for the Holidays

Nothing feels quite the same as the familiarity of an outgrown hometown, memories strewn about like land mines. I glue my eyes to asphalt as my dad drives us past my first kiss, my last high school basketball game, my mother telling me I don’t have a mental illness in the same breath that she says she’s always felt the way I do. 

I know the stretch of road from my parent’s house to the airport like I know my social security number; I memorized it like a necessity. What I don’t know is when it became my parent’s house. All I know is it isn’t mine anymore. 

Gravel crackles underneath my dad’s warm-weather tires as we come up the driveway. My mom is asleep inside the house I grew up in. She didn’t want to pick me up from the airport because my flight came in too late. I haven’t seen her in four months.

On the way from the airport, my dad and I talked about the flight and if next semester’s student loans were approved, and then we listened to old country I’ve always known but never heard outside his truck. He does not tell me he missed me. I don’t tell him. Neither of us wants me to feel guilty for the distance I put between myself and this place. Both of us understand why I had to.

I settle into my childhood bedroom, trying to ignore all the ways it is now literally and figuratively a guest bedroom. Underneath an unfamiliar comforter, I let my friends who have never seen my home know I am home safe. 

When I wake up the next morning, my mom is making breakfast, the way she always does the first morning I’m home. I get ready before I leave my room, not ready for comments about how I “should put on a little makeup.” I go downstairs and she side hugs me while flipping bacon. She does not tell me she missed me. I don’t tell her. We both don’t want to feel guilty about the fact that we’re closer a thousand miles apart than in the same room. One of us understands why.

Christmas is a week away, so I spend the week working my mindless break job, stocking shelves at a local craft store. I work full-time, because I am saving money and because I am spending time. 

On Wednesday, I run into one of my closest high school friends on aisle 7. I can’t remember where he goes to college for the life of me. Don’t even ask about his major.

“Oh, hey Rose.” He speaks first, so I smile and mimic him.

“Oh, hey Asher.” We small talk and both narrowly avoid revealing how little we know about each other’s current lives, relying on the fact that we know inside and out each other’s past lives. 

“We’re having a little, uh, get-together Friday night if you want to come. At my house.” Putting myself in the same space as a bunch of the reasons I now live across the country? 

“Sign me up.”

Everyone knows high school reunions are just comparison conventions. 

Where’s the weird kid now? Did the homecoming queen get out or get stuck? Am I better off now than the hometown hero? It has nothing to do with reconnection and everything to do with hindsight bias. 

I always knew she’d be successful. I always knew he’d drink himself to blue-collar oblivion. I always knew they’d stay together. We all think we knew each other, but all we knew were the fronts we spent 13 years learning to put on. 

In a small town like this, we get several high school reunions a year. For me, it’s when I’m home for breaks. For those who never left, it’s every Friday night. I know this Friday will be no different. 

I know none of those people like me all that much anymore, but I can’t resist going. I know their feelings about me have nothing to do with the person they no longer know and have everything to do with the unacknowledged resentment they have for the way I outgrew them. Call it covert narcissism, it really doesn’t matter to me, but the most cynical part of me is proud of the fact that I left, that I’ve experienced a different world than them. And I resent them for staying as much as they resent me for going. 

I resent them for being able to stay, for being happy enough to survive this place. This town would’ve swallowed me alive more than a cold, cruel city ever could. At least the city is honest about its willingness to suffocate. Here, it’s a slow, blind death by gossip and complacency. 

When Friday night comes around, I find I resent something else too. I resent their contentment. I traveled a thousand miles away and have yet to find exactly what I’m looking for, and here they all are, perfectly happy to sit around drinking with each other until they can’t remember which lifted truck is theirs. My envy for it is equal to my disdain. 

People greet me cheerfully when I walk in, and they ask about New York. I don’t give a single honest answer, because honesty requires explanation. We all answer every “How is…” question with simple answers relative to explanations we neither care to give nor receive. 

“Good./Great./It’s going.”

“Nothing to write home about./I have actually experienced real happiness./I am in more pain than I have ever known, and I don’t know how to express that to anyone or escape the cycle I’ve found myself in.” 

When the small talk runs dry, people fill the space with country music and booze. People play dominoes and reminisce about high school- can you believe it’s already been three years?

I socialize with the best of them and almost remember what it felt like when this was my life. Homecoming queen, battling it out in government class with the same people I knew I’d waste time with later that day, all forgiven because of proximity and limited options. There’s a distance now I couldn’t shake if I wanted to, born from perspective. This isn’t my life anymore, and it will never really feel the way it used to. There’s comfort in that and an ache I have to admit. 

After an hour or two, everyone is a couple drinks in, some a few more than others. I’m sober, mostly because I only like to drink in situations where I feel completely safe and comfortable and partly because I know the proclivity of some of these people to pass judgment on you for doing the very thing they’re doing. I think the human condition allows us each a bit of hypocrisy, but I try to avoid it nonetheless. 

So, I am sober, and others are not. One guy, particularly drunk and particularly vulgar even when he’s sober, looks me directly in the eye as he makes a crude, racist remark. His friends erupt in laughter and others in the room laugh as well, albeit some rather uncomfortably. I hold eye contact with a straight face, refusing to enable this behavior, even though I know approving of it would finally get me the approval I’ve always secretly desired from them. 

“What’s wrong, Rose? Are you mad?” He snickers, looking around and taking a swig of his cheap beer. They all glance knowingly at one another and get these sickly eager grins as they prepare to watch me get "destroyed," as I will inevitably be in their minds, no matter how right or wrong I am. I’m aware of the blatantly obvious mockery of my being a “liberal” that they think is some kind of inside joke between all of them. 

“I just didn’t think it was very funny. Or clever. Or original.” I don’t know why he seeks approval from me, where he knows he won’t find it. He made the joke specifically because he knew it would annoy me, and then asked for my opinion, and still, he will get irritated at how he knows I will respond. Part of me wants to stop responding because I know it would be easier, but that would mean that there is no longer anyone in his life contesting this behavior. It’s not my responsibility, but I’ve tried before to sit idly by and allow it, and I really don’t have it in me. 

“I think you’re just a snowflake.” Once again, his friends cackle at a vastly unoriginal joke that’s been made at my expense countless times. I can see in his eyes the anger that comes from bruised pride, and I should roll my eyes and move on. The girls in the room enjoy this less than the boys, but they sip their drinks quietly, refusing to even meet my eyes. Asher is now standing in the doorway, looking uncomfortably at me. I know he is thinking, “Don’t disturb the peace. Leave it alone.” He’s always agreed with me more than them, but his loyalty has always been with “the boys.” 

In that moment, I think of all the times I cried the whole drive home from school, angry at myself because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and angry at the people I argued with for saying the things they did. I think of all the times Asher told me I needed to just let them be, that they only say things to make me mad, so I should just stay silent and not let them get to me. I think of all the times he sided with them and all the times he told me I was his best friend. 

I think of the new life I have now, where my friends are able to make jokes without them being at someone else’s expense. I remember the nights I spent questioning if I was right and if there were actually people like that in the world. 

I think of all the life I spent lost here. I think of all the parts of me these people never cared to see and could never understand even if they wanted to. I think of the emptiness of our relationships and the lifetime of history that is their foundation. I think of the insignificance of what I'm about to say and the ignorance they're desperately attached to.

In that moment, I feel an irreparable divide between this life and the new one I have built.

“I think you’re just a coward who hides behind racist jokes because you’re so insecure in your own personality that you think it’s the only way anyone will like you, and I think you drink yourself into oblivion every weekend to cope with that. I think you will drown here in cheap beer and wasted potential.” Bruised pride blossoms into rage, and his fingertips whiten as he grips the beer bottle in his hand. 

“Oh, you think you’re better than all of us now?” I try to formulate a response that we’ll both believe. Because, no, in all reality, I don’t think I’m better than them. What does better actually mean? Sure, morally speaking, many would say that I am, but a great deal of people wouldn’t. Every scale on which one can be “better” than someone else is inherently subjective. Different perspectives shift scale degrees, and some even entirely flip the scale upside down. No, I am not better than anyone there.

“I don’t think I’m better. I think I’m different. I think you’re made for this place the same way I was made to leave it. I think I’m nothing like you.” I can’t help the small smile that comes through at that final realization, and it doesn’t leave as I exit this house for perhaps the last time ever, the night chill dim in comparison to the snow I will return to- the snow I will truly go home to. This dismal Christmas, I realize I do have something to celebrate.