Dear Hometown

Dear Hometown,

I love you like my fingers love the water— like soft touch, like pruning skin. I’m timid to embrace you and I can’t quite remember what you feel like.

I miss your warmth. I miss the way you’d let me climb on eagle statues with my mind and bend the wind with my hands. The evenings spent running around in the yard playing our own version of tag.

I want to see you from the inside again. Every time I come to visit you it feels as if I’m just an observer, rather than an old friend, which I figure is probably what I am anyways. I just miss being a part in the grand surreal performance that we all played years ago, where nothing felt real or authentic but we enjoyed it anyways.

I always wanted to explore every corner of you, when I was young, climb the trees and brush the grass like doll hair, dig until my fingers turned green. I never got to.

My neighbor had a willow tree in their yard. Sometimes I imagined having one of my own someday, taking a book underneath its reaching arms and sitting against the trunk to read. I imagined the sun peeling away the dust in the air and sneaking past the branches like vessels through skeletons. I don’t care for willow trees much anymore, because I don’t want to live like I used to.

I wanted to leave you, my tiny town with all of its tiny people, and live in an apple orchard somewhere even though I was rather indifferent about the taste of apples. I wanted to go out with a basket every day and pick as many as I could before my fingers turned green.

Now I see myself in a suburban house, not in a cottage or anything nearly as relaxed and sun-friendly, hopefully having survived high school and college after that, probably barely paying the bills but trying not to worry about it too much. A small family. A big family. I’m not quite sure yet.

I was when I lived in you. Maybe that’s why I miss you so much— I want the same childlike clarity that you gave me, the knowledge of what I wanted and when and the reassurance that it would happen.

I visited you a few weeks ago, and the children who were babies when I met them are in late elementary school now. Like I was. It felt off, like I was in the future, like I was in some other, distorted version of this town I used to know so well that I could bike around and come back without getting lost. But I knew you were the same. You hadn’t changed.

It just forced me, a little bit at a time, to realize that I have.

Love,

Autumn