the south

home

Seven hours in a car, straight up I-55. We'd drive down the highway with the heat of summer blocked by finger-smudged windows, my mother's patience for the repetitive Disney songs sustained by the promise of going home. It's a feeling I've only recently realized-the way you revert back to someone you used to be in a car, foot heavy on the accelerator, not even opting to switch to cruise control because you want to feel the vibrations beneath your feet. You want to feel the constant sensation reminding you that you are going home. With every mile marker, the debris of a new city rushes off in the wind, like fall leaves being swept by transparent wind. You lose the coverings that have shaped you, defined you, changed you, and suddenly you feel raw, like that moment when you first scrape your knee, before the pain sets in, when all you can do is marvel at the patterns of red and flesh, numbness, tingling sensations that indicate a moment when you can't quite return-it's done, it's there, you rely on time now to heal the fragments.

You never really grow up. Not when every time you pass those endless sweeping fields outside Batesville you still have the strongest desire to park your car on the side of the interstate and climb over the decaying fences. Not when every time you pass the rows of cabins buried in grass waves you long to stop and press your hand against the splintered wood. You don't grow up, not really, when you make the same exit off the highway just to stop and stretch your legs before night settles in, when you can find the beauty in a humid sunset draping slowly over the convenience store roof. When stunted cigarette butts burn slowly from the windows of run down diners where men in fraying overalls talk land and game and family.

I think I like that part best-the journey. I like to scan the radio station for the last chorus of a song I once knew all the words to, a song I haven't heard since the last time I was home. I like to roll down the windows too, and run my fingers along the edges of the frame, stretching out slowly, daring myself to reach father and farther just to feel the wind, just to add to the vibration of the engine under my feet, just to feel.

I almost feel an achy heaviness when I approach the gate home, because the journey itself has passed. The transformation has completed and though I am changed inside, the external cannot be fooled. I press my wind-rawed fingers to my lips and catch my reflection through the last flickers of light on the window, the reflection uneven and blurry. I see skin taut against my forehead, and eyes that used to be greener, freckles that used to be more pronounced. I feel the heaviness of change, the push and pull of home with the push and pull of the distance between me and this place. There's no guideline telling you how to reconcile the distance, how to push the two sides together, to force them into submission, to force them to blend and aggregate and coalesce. And so I sit at the end of the driveway and count the needles of pine on the road, waiting until the sun has extinguished its last embers until I climb the hill home.