A Drive Like No Other

All sound seems to fade away, despite the fact I'm listening to a book on tape on my iPhone. Thoughts of the present leave me and ghosts and shadows of the past fill my being. A single emotion does not contain the feelings and it is not anything rational. There is a terrible focus that feels loose and disconnected despite its intensity, like a dream. This is me driving through Harrison, Arkansas on my way home from my father's in Mountain Home. Mountain Home was my life on the weekends. No memories there are really all that negative, except for a prison-like daycare called Small World I stayed at there for a while, but, really, Mountain Home is just boredom and old grumpy Chicago retirees. Unpleasant, sure, but in no way malevolent, as least from my perspective. Harrison was another matter entirely. Maybe it would've been easier if I'd known going in what I was up against, but no one understands that when they're just starting out as a kid do they? Driving through Harrison traditionally involves angry music, such as The Unforgiven, Bodies, or Epiphany, or, at other times, total radio silence in the car as I let the memories wash over me. Not this time though, for this time I just continued to listen to my book on tape, though I'd be hard-pressed to tell you what Jim Norton was talking about on it, for my memories and thoughts were as ever with a childhood I may forever endeavor to understand in futility. Going through Harrison takes me past my old junior high, elementary school, and high school, because it's just the kind of town that there aren't that many routes through. At any given moment along that route, I can envision people there, some long since gone from Arkansas, some long since gone from this Earth. All these memories gnaw away at me like an army of fetid rats. What the whole town wants to remind me of, what I'd give just about anything to forget, is, essentially, the following. "This is your home. You have no choice in that matter. You can call Springfield your home, or Fayetteville your home, but this is your hometown. It was here that you first experienced all the things a child or young man may know. Here it was that you sought your first love, here it was that you tried to make friends, and here it was that you came back to work after college. Oh, you can run from all these memories, and lie to others about what it means, but the fact of the matter is that this place never had any love for you, and that just hurts so much doesn't it? Yes... You'll spend your whole life trying to figure out why the community you were born into hated you so much, why you could never connect with them, why you were a pariah among people you desperately loved and tried to get along with. None of it will ever make sense to you. So you sit there and you act detached, and cynical, and selfish, and emotionally dead, but I'll always be here in your nightmares reminding you that you don't belong. No one loved you here. No one accepted you here. Seek out sweeter tender voices that will tell you that you belong on this Earth with this species if you will, but alone, in the dark, you'll breathe shallow breaths and you'll hear me reminding, insisting, and judging with finality that this place of your childhood will always know who you really are."

I don't know what other people get from their hometowns when they drive around them. Maybe it's a pleasant experience. Good, bad, or ugly though, I doubt it's as intense.

-Frank