I went back out there again. I can’t pass by the Dillard Rd. exit without going miles into nowhere to go drive by that lot and that shack and that tiny store along those uneasily familiar roads. My face is low and slack with a resigned, defeated horror from the moment I turn off the highway. My eyes immediately wet in a stinging regret as I do it, and still I’m compelled, and still there is simply something right about going out there and feeling through this.
This time I added the school I went to. I sat in the bus-only lane looking at my 3rd grade classroom, appearing even more like a prison than 20 years ago. The entire place is chainlinked now, the kids get locked in, and all the grass is paved over. Near one of the gates is a large sign explaining the school is overcrowded and it’s possible kids will get bussed elsewhere or simply transferred outright. The sprinklers watered the pavement rather than the grass. I’d forgotten that in the lot next door is a cemetery. That place was so fucking depressing I didn’t even consider taking a picture.
Whatever is still here for me is out there somewhere. I went to both the elementry schools I went to before and after Pleasant Grove and neither of them were so wretching. Leimbach was actually heartwarming, the school looks great. I went to the house my mother broke the windows out of when I was in 6th grade and remained largely unaffected. Yet looking at the new house that’s on the piece of land where the trailer we lived in once was, I fought the overwhelming urge to drag my wilted, bereaved self to their doorstep, crying like a mad woman.
I wanted to meet them. I wanted to tell them I grew up there, I didn’t know why I’d come, shivering like a tiny monster in the middle of the night. Some part of me hoped they’d recognize me, end up being the kids of the original landlords or something. I wanted them to take me in, to feed me, to comfort me and tell me it was ok for me to reach out, to show me their house and tell me what happened to mine.
I wanted to sleep out there somewhere. In a bush that I’d spend all day tomorrow picking out of my socks or on a floor or in my room that was either freezing or way too warm with that doll lamp and the adult contemporary radio station playing and that huge, deafening fan I insisted upon having on me so I could curl up under my thrashing sheet and pretend I was weathering an intense storm outside.
I was so. Fucking. Lonely. Out there.