Reader’s Choice: I’m not lost, just wandering

Because I read too much, I have retreated into my own narration. I am waiting, simultaneously, to both write and read the upcoming chapter. Which means I find I am folding into myself this week. Sitting in silence. Not hearing, or caring. Things buzz on without me. The bees in the cautious crocuses. People speak to me from far away. I am caught gazing; remembering other things, other times, and too often say, “I’m sorry, what?”

Next week, I fly to NY alone. I will stay in my childhood town, home, room…sinking my Spring boots into memory-saturated familiarity for a week. There are a few bits and pieces still left to sort out before the wedding next month and I will be doing them as if I was a heroine in some sort of soft, coming of age novel written for women like me. The protagonist, returning from a decade away to her small town roots. A time-out from her adult life as she traces familiar steps and sees familiar faces–that are all different now–because she isn’t a child anymore. What will she remember? What will she learn? What parts of her will live in balance of the then and now?

I haven’t been in my hometown for more than a day visit since I was 19 years old. It is a place you’re supposed to want to leave. We all said it the same way they do on our favorite TV shows: I can’t wait to get out of this place and I’m never looking back. But some of us never left. And most of us have touched down for a night or two, now meeting up at a bar instead of the wood behind the park. I hear of people doing this–catching up–making the town their own again after being somewhere else for so long. But until now, I have been away. Stubbornly far away.

It is not that I hold the place in contempt. I do not. It did me no wrong and I remember it fondly: the library with its cherry wood shelves lined with titles no one has read in years. The Five and Dime with the penny tootsie rolls. The decibel of voice used to call over to a friend in her backyard, three doors down. The memories are fair enough–idyllic really. Because the moments that happened in my childhood were pleasant. My memories have been fermenting in something sweet, and now they are saturated with some sort of perfection isn’t quite truth–but is not a lie, either.

It is just nostalgia. I like the nostalgia. I do not know if I need to go back and see things as they are now, and maybe even as they were then. These things have already settled into my mind in a particular way–what is the sense altering that? Do we always need to be chasing the truth to be brave? It is what a good protagonist would do if she was in my position. But I am just me. I am the girl who memorized stars from the middle of the high school football field. I am the girl who read hundreds of stories by the hall light after bedtime. I am the girl who roamed the sidewalks with ice cream cones, and marched the pavement to the beat of band drums every Memorial Day. I am the girl who listened to town gossip while bagging groceries, and the girl who still has the scars from bike falls.

And yet, I’m not. I am grown. I seem to remember those things as happening to a different person–a storybook girl–whose future is still vague and has not yet come to pass. I am reading the chapter of next week already. Picturing a woman who seems to be me, but more defined. She steps off the plane, bag in tow, and walks into the mild evening sway of the maples on her dead end childhood avenue, prepared to face…

…something. But I do not know what, and I do not know what it is I am supposed to learn or remember or put to rest. I will go. I will touch familiar things and breathe the familiar air, indulging one last time in the selfishness of self-discovery before I return again in May with M, to blur the lines of our former selves with a public affirmation of oneness. Because you must not misunderstand me: I know where–who–my home is. I am only uncertain of the importance of this ritual–this last retreat into the youthful life I’ve already lived and grew from.