It was my first time home in over 2 years. I didn’t even spend the night. To this day, I haven’t spent a night in my home since Christmas 2020. That thought is hard to think. It was spring when I returned, but still so gray—a relentless gray. I sent pictures to my friends and they told me it looked like I was in a liminal space.
When growing up in the Midwest, you learn quickly that your romance must be manufactured. You must become a collector of special places, a geographer of meaning. I was so desperate to feel that hope or the comfort that comes from a self-inflicted holy moment, so I did the rounds. Like a tourist, I visited the landmarks of my life in an attempt to milk any drop of feeling out of them, even rotting nostalgia. Anything at all.
I climbed the hill of my favorite park, the same hill I have climbed hundreds of times. If you could peer into the shadowy realm of memory, you would see how my footprints are faintly etched into its greenery and how its silhouette slouches into mine.
But it’s just a hill. A hill I have rolled down, sledded down, had picnics and sex on top of, and smoked all manner of things upon—most notably my teenage, spray-painted gold juul “Petunia,” the queen of carcinogens. She once spent a sordid night hidden in the hill’s green grasp only to be miraculously recovered in the morning—intact—but covered in dew. It once held a tuberculosis sanatorium. This I learned from a man carrying a sack of feathers who appeared out of the woods one day in the summer of 2020. He was a ghost of the building and he told me as a kid he would gaze out of the window and watch the man mow the lawn and smell the fresh grass. The building is gone but the same grass still covers the same hill. It has nothing more now than a swing set and a covered wooden gazebo carved with my initials and the initials of the person I miss most in the world. I always check if they are still there. I even freshen them up sometimes, although it feels wrong. I hope more than anything, anything in the whole world that we will do that together one day.
As always, the hill welcomed me silently. I sat on the swings and listened to a few choice songs. “You’ll Never Walk Alone” by Nina Simone specifically sits in my memory. It’s a very special song, use it well. I kicked up my feet (making the effort), swinging back and forth, the same crescent I have made hundreds of times through almost a decade. I looked down the hill, through the skeletal winter branches of the trees lining the river that splits my hometown, across the river, to the horizon, to nothing, to everything. My park is called Lost Dauphin after the vanished French prince. Sometimes I think I am him reincarnated, found and lost and found and lost again.
I did all of this and I felt nothing. Funny how feeling nothing is often synonymous to feeling sadness. But there’s a difference, even sadness is preferable to nothing. Sadness exists at least, nothing is just an absence, a vacuum, loss with no face.
So, I continued. To another place, to say hello to some old friends. I won’t tell you who they are, but they stand in a field on a road with no name. A road with no name and no end, surrounded by flat land that wears a coat of swaying grass. I always feel a glimmer of fear when I turn onto that road—fear that they don’t live there anymore, fear that they’ve abandoned me, fear that I dreamed them up. But, I always continue. And there they are. They raise their heads to look at my car as I approach, horns curling towards the sun. Sometimes I get out and walk closer. Sometimes I stay in my car and just look out the window. I always play a sacred song, that is the most important rule. That’s the secret.
It was the first time I had visited them in years, but they were still there, like always. I did not feel any grand emotion, which sometimes happens. I’ve felt some of my strongest emotions on that road, in that field, looking at them. But this time, in passion’s place, I did something new. This time, I promised them I would return, and I felt the truth in that promise and saw it was a promise to myself as well. Maybe a promise is stronger than a feeling. Maybe a promise is the strongest thing we have.
I left home the same day I arrived. In my notes, I wrote, “I am taller now or my kitchen has shrunk, proof I grew in the 2 years I did not visit.”
(ok hi so i wrote this earlier this year & it is actually an excerpt or possibly a sacrificed portion of something Larger i’m writing but i’m sitting in an airport about to take a flight home so it felt like the right time to post. hopefully part 2 is a bit more cheerful. also no they aren’t cows.)