the neighborhood.

You used to be friends with these people, I want to say.  You drove Mrs. Epperson to the hospital when she was giving birth to Sally.  Mr. Epperson was out of town on a business trip and it was pouring rain but you did it.  You played cards with the Montgomery’s every Monday night, you came home drunk and singing and laughing and happy, holding my mother’s hand and spinning her, equally drunk, around the kitchen table.  You helped Mr. Parks fix his car, you shoveled Mrs. Allen’s driveway for her after her husband died.  Every single time it snowed.  Without being asked and without being prompted or reminded. 

This was your neighborhood.  This was your town.  And you left.  You got out.

These small towns are toxic, you said.  They’re suffocating.  They get under your skin and they imprint themselves on you and they never let you get away from them.  And the only way to break free is to break free completely, and that’s why you did it.  That’s why you left.  You can never come back because it will never be the same.  The people here, they attach onto you like a parasite, like an outsider; they suck away everything positive.  They feed on possibility - what you could have done with yourself, what you could have made of yourself.  Places you could have gone, people you would have met. 

That’s what you said but I don’t think you meant any of it.  I think it came from a place of anger, from a place of sadness, from a place of being cast out and stripped of all title and banned from ever returning.  It wasn’t your choice to leave.  And I think that’s why you had to hate it.  You had to hate it to save yourself from the pain of losing it.