Home-town

It’s a strange feeling to be a tourist in your own hometown. That’s what happens when you go away on a whim, and life suddenly does its funny thing of bringing you right back to the starting line. A blink, and it seems you’ve never taken the first step. Yet, you’ve already lived enough of a lifetime to know somewhere, deep down inside, that you did need to start over.

“Who doesn’t deserve a second chance?” That’s what your mother asks you when you call her late at night after you were dumped by the girl you thought you’d marry. She left because she expected more of you. It’s not that her expectations were too high; it’s just that you were never one to fulfill them. You were more spontaneous. Not the fun spontaneous that called out fake-sick from work to take her somewhere for the weekend, or the type that brought home a stray dog that trailed your car down the street. You were the spontaneous who couldn’t plan, who wouldn’t focus for the sake of being unsure and noncommittal. What if there was something better out there, and what if you settled too early before you tested the waters? But what if the waters were testing you, and you just couldn’t let the sails down for once in your life?

You told your mother you didn’t deserve a second chance, mostly because your now-ex deserved someone better. That’s what you told yourself, not knowing yourself in the slightest. The “you” that you thought you knew was just as she saw you: insecure, wishy-washy, afraid. Love isn’t made for someone like you. Not today, and probably not yesterday or tomorrow, though your mother tries to assure you that life gives you time to make mistakes and figure things out.

So, now you’re back in your hometown, driving the same car you drove in high school. You’ve loaded up just about everything you took with you the first time you left, and it’s all going with you back to the place where everything started. Everything that was new and original, the stuff that didn’t smell like your hometown, went away with her. She was the escape. Your fresh start to prove that you could create something more than just the expectation. But who were you trying to prove, anyway? Could you name them? Could they still name you?

It takes you only a few seconds to realize that your hometown isn’t the same place at all. Everything looks essentially the same as when you left, but the colors aren’t the same. Your eyes scan the streets, and all you see is sepia, faded. You could picture everything as it was, and you’d remember it just the same. There was no feeling, just sights. Nothing you couldn’t capture in a frame. It was just that, a still picture with no desire to look beyond the edges.

You pull into your parents’ driveway. There is an apparent glow around your family dog as he waddles out the front door behind your mother when she meets you at your car door. He is the consistency you craved, but a reminder, too, of false permanence. A blink is all it takes, but luckily, his is slow, endearing. He finds enough strength to prop his front paws on your window and welcome you home. It makes you smile, and that makes your mother smile. It’s priceless, one of the few things life affords you. You’ll pay for it later when it’s just a memory, but you don’t think about that now. The joy is worth more than the eventual pain, and you’ll realize that someday.

After a week of home-cooked meals, you start to think that maybe home is in your hometown, but it doesn’t take much exploring before you realize you either don’t belong now or have never belonged. Surely it wasn’t always this difficult to get around your small, constricting hometown. Your hometown had a way of tying invisible strings to your arms and legs, pulling you back more forcibly each time you tried to step out of its confines. If your hometown was once a content place to live, it’s because you didn’t know a better way of life. You did now, and as much as you wanted it, at least the pull of your hometown was real. It made you feel something, and feeling poor was better than feeling nothing at all.

The local service station heard you went to school for engineering thanks to your family (they adored your promises more than your outcomes, expectations they knew deep down inside that you’d never fulfill), and they offered you a job. You’re working the front desk, helping customers with whatever auto needs they have, matching parts numbers and checking service engine lights. A lot of the customers remind you you’re back in your hometown. Some give you their memories of your younger self, reawakening parts of yourself you thought you’d lost forever, for better or worse. Others ask you if you’re a diversity hire, as if that’s something you could answer. You’re as qualified for this job as you believe you can be. Customer service is custom to you. It’s playing pretend.

When does your hometown become your home, anyway? It must be the minute you leave and find yourself trying to adjust to a new place, with new faces asking you where you’re from. They know you’re not from here, because there’s something about you that’s different. It’s something different that means you probably won’t be able to adjust to this new place, either. It’s the same story in a different location, a loop of endless roles with expectations you’ll never fulfill and more dreams and memories than milestones, anything to prove your capacity for survival. You still don’t know who you’re trying to prove. And what is it you’re trying to prove? Your worth, persistence, stubbornness? But here you are, back in your hometown. Something within you wants you to start again. Not give up, but start again.

When she dumps you, the first person that comes to mind is your mother. It’s scary the way she’s somehow always first to know when things go wrong. For so long, you wanted to make sure you weren’t like your parents. There was a childhood, a younger you still alive within that deserved so much more than what he was given. You couldn’t be like your parents. That was a mantra you repeated, even as you looked in the mirror and saw your father’s cheekbones, your mother’s nose, every feature a reminder of where you came from. Not your hometown, but the one that others saw. The one that kept you in a stalemate between expectation and belonging. Your mother knew plenty about second chances, and she deserved them. Crossing borders were more than geographical, more than something you could apply for and step over, put a new flag in your front yard and tell the neighbors a name that was only yours here and nowhere else. For the sake of trying to belong.

Whoever you were underneath it all, that was something you were still figuring out. Somewhere deep down inside you knew that it wasn’t your hometown’s responsibility to figure it out, and it wasn’t your ex, or your mother, or even your dog’s responsibility. You’d never wrap your mind around what it meant to be someone. How could you define what it meant to be? For now, though, it meant starting over. Returning to the place you called home because you needed to start somewhere. Returning to the people who were most familiar with you, reminding you of who you once were. It’s a starting place, and you have the whole rest of your life to figure out what it means to belong.