Wayfarers All

"He rose and descended river-wards once more, then changed his mind and sought the side of the dusty lane.There, lying half-buried in the thick, cool under-hedge that bordered it, he could muse on the metalled road and all the wonderous world that it led to; on all the wayfarers, too, that might have trodden it, and the fortunes and adventures they had gone to seek or found unseeking - out there, beyond..."

From The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

A Dark Road

It's been a year since I came back to my hometown. It's been a hard road. Desolate.There are few ghosts here, on the rim of the desert. Mostly they are ghosts of the mind. 

In a strictly practical way, things are better here than the dead end of the gulf coast.You can see it in the people, with their yoga bodies and shiny hair, no look of desperation to distort their features. No one is selling crack in the 'hood - there is no 'hood, and no need to worry about your children's education. It's all so very positive, so...upwardly mobile. The dark side of this coin is that failure is spurned equally as hard. 

On the gulf coast, failure - if not a way of life -  is something one co-exists with, a condition you are simply too hot and too tired to rise above. Oh, maybe not in the cities so much, but in these little port towns where even the most successful are at the last bus stop on their career path - it only takes one blow to send people toppling like a row of dominoes. And the air is so heavy, it's hard to get up again. 

So, in a very practical sense, it's better. But who wants to go back to a place that has cruelty in its bones? I spent the worst years of my life in this place and frankly, it hasn't changed. Old traumas lurk at every corner. Memories break through the surface like tree roots through concrete. I'd never had the faintest desire to come home, for good reasons. I can't wait for the day I'll be able to leave it again. 

One evening this past Winter, I walked to the end of the road and looked down the hill. Everything was dark but for pools of light beneath distant streetlamps. Music drifted in from the dance hall above the town, an exacting cover of  Mary Jane's Last Dance. I studied the pools of light. Somehow, the sight of them made me feel less lonely.