Once you've left "home", you can never truly return. Moving away from a parent or parents, whether a joyful or sorrowful (or mixed) experience, is a defining one. After that, you can never re-capture the feeling you had as a youth in living under a parent's roof.

Generally refers to the state of flux a person's life gains when entering adulthood. When you return to the place you once called home, thanks to the passage of time, it's probably not going to carry the same connotations as it once might have. The changing of your hometown, the gradual growing apart of old friends, all signifies that fact that the home you once knew is now, for all intents and purposes, gone.

The town where I was born was situated in the mountains of Massachusetts, twenty or thirty miles away from any appreciable civilization. The population hovered around a thousand, spread over an area three times that of the average city.

The biggest local feature was the country store, which sold gasoline, video cassettes, and giant wheels of cheese.

We lived on top of one of the more significant peaks in the town. Next door to us lived my mother's parents, who had purchased a tract of land larger than the Vatican City, then settled about three acres of it. The rest was a big untamed wilderness, where we built dams and campsites and swam in the three freezing rivers that ran through it.

This must be the place, right? Every morning I shipped off on the bus to the lousy consolidated school five miles away, and traded baseball cards with Trevor Fox, who lived down the street from me. Trevor's lawn was composed of trucks up on blocks and shotgun casings. Oddly enough, the school playground was covered with dead casings, too, buried among the rocks.

Trevor's father beat his mother, of course. It almost seems like a given now; they weren't the happiest of families.

A year before we left, the EPA closed the country store down -- gas from the two ancient pumps had been leaking underground and into the river. Local wildlife was devestated.

My friend Chris lived on the other side of town. Our families had dinner or hot cocoa together sometimes. We played Stratego and AtariVision in our free time. I saw him a few months ago selling Christmas trees on the corner. My grandmother was driving and sped up slightly. I didn't quite know what to think.

Kevin was my good buddy after Chris and I stopped hanging out so much. We'd play video games every Sunday after church; we were on the same baseball team; his family was a little bit dysfunctional. By local standards, though, they weren't too bad. My mother and I went to meet his family last year to reminisce and such about old times. We waited for them in front of the old supermarket for two hours before giving up and calling their house. No answer. We called Kevin's sister's cellphone, which we'd been given if other numbers didn't work. She answered.

"I'm sorry they haven't showed up, guys. My mother just had an aneurysm."

Just like that. Oxygen flow had been cut off to large parts of her brain. She was comatose for three months. When my mother went to see her, she didn't recognize her, or anyone else.

Our next-door neighbors had a bitter, knock-down, drag-out divorce. We still see them individually once in a while.

Down the street, Ms. Rabowitz hanged herself.

We don't go back much anymore. My grandparents still live there, but they've retired and spend a couple of weeks at home at most. Some small towns are not just the farms and romance that people imagine them to be.

Cursed Earth | Later -->

They say you can never go home again. Well, I don't rightly know who "they" are, but they're right. At the very least, Peoria, Illinois sure as hell doesn't look like any place I'd ever call home, anymore. I mean, hell, there's not a single person here anymore! The soul of a city is its people, and without them, it's just a husk. In fact, even as cities in this cursed earth go, this one's deader than most. It's like all the people just evaporated or something. Just like that. Poof. Mind you, I have seen this before - Lexington was like this - but I don't come across it very often, and I've been looking for a mighty long time.

How long I've been looking, I think I lost track, but it's been at least, oh, three winters now. Three winters of wandering, criss-crossing back and forth over the southern USA, hoping to find something still operating. I haven't covered all the ground, not by a longshot, especially down in the bayous of Louisiana or the deserts of Texas, but I can tell you this much - there's not a hell of a lot left. Oh, there's a few guys still around, but most of 'em don't trust a soul anymore. Mostly, it's signs of desperate last stands and mass exodus everywhere you turn, and distressingly often, it's worse than that. It's miles upon miles of gridlock, an endless train of smashed windows and rusting metal, drivers and passengers long since consumed to slake demonic appetites. Frankly, I can't imagine it, the sickening futility of it all, traffic backed up down every road, not moving, as the demons close in from all sides. I'm never gonna let that happen to me. But I digress.

So finally, my wanderings bring me here, to Peoria, where I was born, forty-seven years ago. God, there's nothing here, not even demons. It may be dead, but for the first time in a very long while, I can sleep under the stars without fear.

I awake the next morning and pile back into my battered Peterbilt. Though I know it's impossible, I keep getting sporadic shortwave signals from the north that sound an awful lot like PSK to my ear. It's probably just a beacon, but I've got to check it out, just in case. What else is there for an old wanderer to do with his time? It's not like I can go home again, anyway.

You can always go back,
it's just that you won't.
More than just place,
it s fragment of time
tarnished and cracked
but remembered just fine.

And it's never going to,
it's always going back.

except you know you can't stay
except you know that it's gone
because ghosts of memories only live for so long

It's fighting the flow of the river of time,
forcing the hands so the clock unwinds
and you feel yourself change into old familiar skin
until you run out of breath and leave again.

♫♪ ♪♫

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