I JUST CAN’T ESCAPE

Lately, no matter where I turn, I keep encountering my hometown in some way.

It’s all coincidental and, at first, unwanted, though now my feelings are conflicted. I’ll read Wikipedia summaries and find out the movie takes place there. I’ll read further down and find out it’s filmed there. I’ll open a video up and get jumpscared by the very distinct picture of the skyline. Earlier today I opened up a video on the inside of an in-flight Boeing 727-200 in 1992 for research and heard over the intercom that my city was their final destination.

God, I just can’t leave. I’ll leave physically but it’s still there everywhere I turn, haha. I keep getting reminders of it everywhere I go. Even my college town architecturally resembles where I hail from. I didn’t even get the weird, disorienting feeling of being in a new environment back when I was a freshman. I just felt right at home.

I’m not from a small town, so it’s not like I harbor any resentment for growing up in rural nowhere where you need a car to get around, but I understand what those small town kids feel when they say they want to get away. I wasn’t kidding when I said I want to move away for good.

I have a deep disdain for this place. When I was younger, I always said I’d come back to give birth, visit my family, and die, but now I don’t even want to do two of those things anymore. I’ve even told my family repeatedly I’ll gladly relocate them to wherever they desire so they don’t have to deal with the city’s antics either. It’s like some weird caricature of itself, like some gross fleshy creature who’s heart is barely beating because of the beating it takes.

Not like it’s even gonna be there to go back to, anyway. They predict the whole thing’s gonna be underwater by the time 2050 rolls around, so the place I used to call home may not even be around anymore. Good riddance.

So I consider this just me getting a jump on things before they go all Atlantis. The only thing that’s ever going to drag me back to a place like that is the love I have for my mom. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even bother going back.

I’m not the first to leave either, and I definitely won’t be the last. Every year more and more residents leave as tourists and transplants are favored by a corrupt city hall that would rather destroy homeless camps during high-volume seasons so tourists don’t have to know how bad it is. There used to be blatant favoritism to the transplants, but that place is engorging itself with so much greed that it doesn’t even listen to them anymore. It’s starting to treat them like the residents. You won’t get any real opportunity unless you either have money, or you leave. And that’s why so many locals opt to leave. We’re a dispersed, dying breed.

I know I’ll miss it, in some weird way. We always do. I’m not the first to compare it to an abusive relationship, where you can’t recall any good but you still feel something for it, you know? I think it will move me at times, and it does. I miss the idea of it, more than anything. But what it used to be, back before it was transformed into the grotesque, caricatural pest on life-support it is today, has been gone even before I was born. I think it got washed away in the flood.

This post flew way off course from where it was supposed to be. At first I was just going to joke around about my repeated encounters with my city everywhere I go, but I realize I never properly wrote this post up. I’ve had this in mind even before this blog was a thing. Maybe instead of trying to ignore the pattern of coincidences, but recognizing it for what it is, the random encounters will finally go away! A girl can dream!