when i was in high school, i would spend every day sitting with my friend kyle throwing around insults about our hometown like water balloons. i knew that place hated me and i made sure that most people i knew that i hated it too. love felt alien to me, its jagged edges never having the chance to jump of and rip out a piece of me. hate was comfortable like a gas station you visit on the way to work every day to buy red 40 laced corn syrup for an entire hot, long summer. kyle and i would blabber on about the places we wanted to go, what simultaneously living in a town with more than 600 people and having the freedom to do whatever we wanted would be like. i felt as if i was looking down at the real world from 100 miles above the earth’s surface, falling slowly, waiting for the cloud cover to let itself leave my site and solid ground to become my new, strange, ugly friend. the world was uncomplicated and abstract, everywhere felt precious and (which hasn’t changed) like a children’s cartoon character wax museum of cultures that i felt i’d never get to experience for myself (which has changed), and places i’d never go. a good chunk of my high school treated me as a creature that rested somewhere between a ghost and a circus clown. i’m being serious when i say fair enough with the latter, but i truly did feel like the former in that insular collection of 600 people, zero traffic lights, one gas station, and one barbecue restaurant i will never eat at (and no one can make me). it’s fair to say that both my hometown and i treated each other with visible displays of lacking of interest that i haven’t been able to muster since.

  back then, time felt overwhelmingly huge, unscalable, like seeing a mountain feels to someone who has spent all of their life surrounded by flat dirt and dense corn. college was an oasis that i felt like was lightyears away, being immersed in a culture outside my own was unthinkable, and everything around me felt worthless. i wished to be anywhere, but that high school cafeteria situated squarely in the center of everyone else’s best years and 5,000 miles away from mine. the count-down while waiting for my “child” self to die and my “adult” was long and gross, and despite being literal years of my life, still feels like just one long day of kyle and i fantasizing about what being anywhere but in an abnormally large high school class of 55 in a town of 600 may feel like. i’ve been lucky enough to go to university, to live in dublin for a time, to visit tokyo, to interact with people whose lives are so utterly different to mine that it makes me feel like a cartoon circus clown of american capitalism and i wouldn’t trade it for the world. my life truly did get bigger, more delicious, and confusing like a meal that was eaten in a childhood fever dream.

  now the world is open and fast, people and places pass by like bullets while i keep slowly falling closer to bare earth. weirdly enough, despite all of my groaning at the time, i look back at my high school years as one giant summer break from not knowing what to hate, who to love, and where to go. the only direction was up. there will always be something i cherish about that feeling...

-fin (2025-01-23)