He hadn't been back here in a while.
The first thing that he noticed was how nothing had changed. The faces he saw weren't all the same, but a considerable number of them were. The buildings were still standing, grey, somewhat dilapidated, but still standing. Part of him had expected the town to be a warzone, an open sore, part of him had even hoped for that to be the case, had desperately wanted to see a deep catastrophic change in his hometown that mirrored the change that had come over him. No such luck.
He had gone to college with no intent of ever going back, with no intent of ever seeing the complacent faces of the people he had known. He would miss his friends, but really it wouldn't be that big a loss. He'd move on. That's what they had done, wasn't it? When he had his accident. Internally, he spat the word, hissed it, and screamed it. How many times had people said that word? Accident. He scratched one of his scars, the long one that trailed a winding trail from his left eye to the corner of his mouth.
He had come home for Christmas, and if he was being honest, which he tried to be, always, he really had no idea why. He had been intending to spend the holidays at a friend's house, watching movies and eating stale chips, but then something happened. He awoke, with a deep longing in his stomach. People always said that they felt their feelings in their hearts, but he felt them in his stomach. A deep hollowness that couldn't be hunger. He needed to go back. He needed something there. Something he couldn't get where he was. He hadn't gone back as a matter of principle, and he was very much a man of principle, he had very little in the world, but he had his principle, and so he would have stayed, but the aching was unbearable.
So he bought a train ticket. He had come back.
Here he was. And he had no idea what he wanted.
It was late, too late to explain his sudden presence to his parents. He needed a place to stay, a place where nobody would question his arrival, his motivation for being there. Which is how he ended up at Tummler's apartment.
Tummler had been a friend of his mother, for a while. Eventually, they had a bit of a falling out, in the wake of his accident. But Tummler had made it clear that he was welcome in her home. "Chris," she had said to him in the hospital. "If you ever find yourself in trouble, Maggie and I want you to know that you are welcome to stay with us until you're back on your feet." Maggie was Tummler's wife. They had a daughter, who was a couple of years younger than him.
When he had made his way to the store that was downstairs from their apartment, (Crystal Thrift, owned by Maggie) and asked to see Tummler, a young man with the beginning of a mustache, and several acne scars who evidently worked there brought him to her. She looked him over, with her wide red eyes and perpetually glaring white eyebrows, and nodded once. " What you need, my friend," she said "is a warm shower." He had smiled then, which was difficult to tell if you didn't know him well, due to the state of his face, and she had smiled back.
He showered. Eventually, he left the shower and sat on the couch in the living room. Maggie came up the stairs, and said " Hello, Chris." That was all. No questions asked, just a small smile and a greeting. The daughter, Chris could never remember the name, but it started with a K, waved at him, and promptly went back to what she was doing before, which seemed to be Tap Dancing. To each their own, Chris thought, and then he fell asleep on the couch.
Chris attempted to return to his childhood home the next morning. It went about as well as expected. After a heated argument on the front porch, he left and hopped on a Greyhound bus. He rode it as far as the slightly seedy fast food place, at which he bought a breakfast of limited nutritional value, and ate it. He was fully aware of what a disturbing sight it was to watch him eat, more food ended up on the ground than in his mouth, but he didn't actually care. He had that sickening feeling, that deep desire to sneak up on a small child and scream, revealing his face. He hadn't felt that way since he had left home. This trip, this whole trip felt like a relapse, a return to the past that contained no secrets, and no catharsis. The town was as he had left it. The sun rose, and set, the world still spun, and the wind still whistled through the dark pine forests.
And then it began to snow. Chris left the fast food place and stood on the sidewalk. He looked up and stuck his tongue out. A snowflake melted on his tongue. It tasted like ashes, but he swallowed it anyway.
He started to laugh. He laughed and laughed until tears began to roll down his pockmarked face. It was a miracle. Everything was a miracle, that was the secret of life. Life was a sequence of miracles. It was a miracle he had survived the accident. It was a miracle he had recovered. It was a miracle he had managed to leave his home, and it was a miracle that he was back, that he had the strength to stand here now, in the place that had rejected him. He would never understand it, he would never understand the whys and hows. But he was home. He was home, wherever he was. A man stared at him, and Chris realized how absurd he must look, laughing, on his knees, outside of a Burger King. " It's a Christmas miracle," he told the man, and he realized how stupid that sounded, and he laughed even harder. He felt like a fountain of joy, spilling out, flowing. He felt alive.
The next day, he took a train home. He spent the rest of the holidays at a friend's house, watching TV and eating stale chips.