Sometimes you can't go home again

Thomas Wolfe, a famous Southern American writer who lived in the first half of the twentieth century (and matriculated at the University of North Carolina here in Chapel Hill), was the one who famously said, "You can't go home again".  While this may not be true for everyone, for many of us this is, indeed, the case.

Nowhere

I spent 18 summers in a town

on the Mississippi:

and as many winters,

springs and falls.

I have been away

longer than I ever lived there,

and now it feels like I have no past,

no roots,

no memories entwined

with the metallic taste

of that earth,

the sound of those birds singing,

the look of sunsets over that house.

the people who shared that house with me,

and laughter and tears,

and all of my DNA.

they are more strangers to me today

than ever.

18 years (and more)

of shared history,

biology, roots,

and to what end?

with each passing season—

living my own life

living out of my own self and

my own identity—

I leave those fellow travelers further behind.

the idiom, the shared language

we used to communicate is now no longer enough.

the common ground that gave our experiences meaning

has shrunk to a small, unkempt, and neglected

old rose garden.

the once vigorous bushes, that sadly produced

so few fragrant and surprising blossoms,

are old and gnarled,

hanging on more out of habit

than necessity.

they exhausted their precious

and limited resources years ago;

no one can remember when last

they produced a flower, even a stunted

and disease-warped exemplar of something

we know from other accounts

can be magnificent.

and so this lineage will end with me.

sometimes it feels as if I am the last of my line

still alive, though this

is hardly the case.

the last creative impulse this pedigree produced

was the absolute necessity of escape,

a severing of the bonds encircling

me like vines,

overly luxuriant, threatening to choke

the life out of me.

I am not yet ready to capitulate to the grim

conclusion of this farcical saga.

the spirit of rebellion (or at least self-preservation)

awoke in me a warrior’s fierceness

to protect the precious life put in my charge

by some intelligence greater than my own.

to live, I had to die,

cut myself adrift,,

construct a raft out of different dreams, choose another purpose for my life,

and reset my compass to keep my always

pointed toward my own true north.