Hometown,

You’re kind of bitter. There’s an unsweetened spite in the air that belongs to your city limits. There are all these memories I cannot recreate. I don’t want to, either. You can keep them hidden in the parks and the libraries and the public school parking lots. Most of them are unpleasant and I’d rather you remember them than I. I think you could retell them better than I could, most days.

There is little known pleasing that I get from you, after all, I have known you for 18 years and I might have willingly befriended you for two or three months, if that. You have a good nature, I’m sure. Well intentions and you might have smiled my way on the days it was raining really hard. Maybe I haven’t given you the proper chance. You have some pretty good 24 hour diners that make the best pecan waffles when you’re drowsy. The art museum piles up the best of what the town’s creativity stretches too. There was this one night (but, now that I think about it, it was almost every night the summer of 2014) where all I did was drive around you to feel myself again, and without the streetlights, there would be no coming around.

When I was younger, the best you could offer me was a headstone. And in the spring, you taste like smoke-not quite here, not quite there. I don’t think I have ever not wanted to hop on a train north without saying goodbye to the small, vacant, harrowing town that I have cast you to be. And that’s all this is, really. A cast I’ve given you that will never properly heal, because though I see a flaw in you, it is because of the happenings to me personally. It is not you. It is me.

If all the same situations were to take place in New York, I would call New York ungodly. If all the same situations were to take place in Portland, I would call Portland dismal. Now, that I am saying goodbye to your 24 hour diners and art museums and horrible high schools that really do need fixing, I could warm up to you. You are where I learned to walk, to write and to understand that time fixing yourself is time well spent. There are at least a solid four or five people I completely adore that share the same hometown as I. They know the same burdens and clarity. You have glorious sunrises, promise.

I could get those anywhere I want, sunrises. But, they wouldn’t have the same effect as a hometown brew stirring itself yellow. Leaving you doesn’t seem as radiant as I’ve fantasized it being for so many months. It’s the morals, I suppose.

I have heard so many insensitive people call you mediocre- you are not. Believe it if you want, but some people are content with a hometown that always has a place to serve coffee and a neighborhood you could call home your whole life. Some people want more, some people want less. There is no right or wrong when it comes to it.

But, I want more and you are not giving it to me. I will always return when I want to taste that spring smoke, though. I will always return I can’t get the sunrise right. You are not so bad, maybe it was all a trick of the light.