Precious Little Town

"You'll always go home again" is something people like to say.

"You'll miss it when you leave" they tell me when I say that I hate it here.

And sometimes I wish they were right, but it's not just some skin-deep desire to spread my wings and see the world.  This is something different-the way this place doesn't fit together with me.

I wonder if they could see this place through my eyes, if they would still promise me the impossible.

I drive through the neighborhood glancing down the street and praying I don't see the person I trusted with the very fabric of who I am and who walked away without another word.

I pass a building that anchors my memories of the worst moments of my life every day just to get into town.

I drive past one, two, three, or more neighborhoods and can count in each one the number of people who left me scarred.

I see the school I begged to be free from, the school where the damage began, the very building where the seeds of future disaster were sown and the sight of the brick makes me nauseous almost five years later.

Every corner is the marking of a war zone or a hostile territory.

Milk runs are like walking behind enemy lines with shields up and knives at the ready.

I don't say I want to leave because of some latent teenage angst that pushes me into isolation and dramatics.

I say I want to leave because I drive through this small town and there is not enough air in the atmosphere to keep me alive.

I drive through the town that "raised" me, the town that bullied me into submission, the town that knocked me around until I didn't exist anymore, and I feel sick to my stomach.

I drive through streets I could walk blind folded with white knuckles because on every side, I am surrounded by people who want to hurt me; people who have hurt me.

People think my dreams are just bigger than the horizon will let me see, but that isn't the problem.

It's not that I've somehow missed the little charms of the little town full of little people.

It's that I haven't missed them at all.  I see the charms and they don't make up for the hurt and the hatred and the unfairness.  They don't make up for the way people spoke, the way people pushed, the way people dismissed.

It's hard to care about hardwood floors in a house that's on fire.

It's hard to care about the charms of a small town when the town taught me that I am not enough, and that I am too much, and that who I am is not who I should be.

I know people find a home here.  I know people raise children and find love and live beautiful lives here.  I wish I could find that too.

But when I look out my window, I don't see some charming hometown that molded me into who I am.

I see the war zone I fought through.

The danger I grew in spite of.

The anger and hatred and venom that tried to choke me out when I wanted was to love and to live and to find myself.

This town isn't home, it's a haunted house.

This precious little town is just a nightmare.