The first thing you have to do is accept it.
This isn’t something you can easily
change; you live here.
This is it.
If you don’t feel like asking your whole family to uproot
themselves and move to a big city, because, really, that’s a lot to ask, then you’re stuck.
You had a good childhood. You came up with games in your backyard, you went to the
park, you read books. Your school was small, but you won’t realize just how small it
really was until you get to college. You went to the same restaurants for birthdays,
graduations, and when your relatives from Minnesota are in town. Apparently living near
the Mall of America is groundbreaking and revolutionary. So many stores and options,
so many more restaurants than what you have here. They tell you you have come and
visit.
The drive on Route 8 is the same every single morning. It’s a long and winding
two lane road. You pass old farmhouses, tiny ranches, and houses flood twice a year
when it rains in late winter and spring. If you don’t drive over sixty in the thirty miles per
hour speed limit area, you’ll get passed by pickup trucks and teenagers. You’ll also pass
a significant amount of confederate flags waving outside. You try to ignore those. Every
time you pass the old dirt bike track, you check on the small, weathered white house
with the race car inflatable out front to see if the man is out chopping wood and building
a bonfire at seven in the morning. He has done this almost everyday for the eighteen
years you have driven down this road. To this day you cannot figure him out.
This drive is also where you do your best thinking. You’ve driven down this road
when you found out you got into the college you wanted to go to, when you were on
your way to lunch with your mom, when your best friend got admitted to the hospital
junior year and you had to leave school. You watch the sun rise over the hills every
morning, poking through the trees. You watch it set when you’re on the way home. You
roll the windows down. On your last drive there before you move away from home, your
eyes may well up. Years and years of memories here might come back all in an instant.
You’ll realize this was more than just a drive to you.
When you get to college, you’ll realize just how different your experiences were
when you were growing up. You’ll get saucer sized eyes in response to you explaining
how you graduated from a class of thirty five. You will not recognize every face that you
see. You’ll be told you have the slightest southern accent, or it’ll be surprising that you
seemingly do not considering where you grew up. Someone will ask, “isn’t that right
next to Texas?” when you live about a thousand miles from there. Your closest friends
are from all over the country now, one from Maryland, the other from Colorado, and the
other from Rhode Island.
When you visit home for breaks, you will still be bored out of your mind on some
days, and to remedy this you can occasionally drive to Target or eat at the same Panera
Bread that you have for years. Your friends from other, bigger towns, are doing more
exciting things, so call them occasionally and live vicariously through them. Look
forward to going back to school. You realize that some things will never change, and
though this is frustrating, it is deeply endearing to you, too. You think about this as you
drive down Route 8.