They don’t understand why I hate going home.
They don’t understand why you can’t go back.

It’s like driving into despair. It’s like ripping the stitches out of a partially healed wound. Every time. It’s like getting on a roller coaster that goes to fast and has too many loops and it doesn’t stop until I leave. It’s like driving straight into every memory that I’d be better off forgetting. It’s a tire swing and horseback riding. It’s best friends laughing at Friday night football games. It’s summertime in the country. It’s climbing out of my window in the middle of the night to lay in the grass and look at the stars. It’s the smell of hog farms. It’s putting on a dress for eighth grade prom alone and staring back at a stranger in the mirror. It’s the moving out of the house you grew up in because your mom is dead. It’s having to choose on Christmas who’s house to go to and never being able to quite please everyone. It’s the feeling of wanting so badly to be wanted and loved by strangers that share your DNA, but never really belonging. It’s fighting with your little brother that  you’re not allowed to hit no matter how many times he hits you. It’s never hearing I love you from the one person you want to hear it from. It’s needing your best friend to save you and watching her rescue someone else. It’s crying yourself to sleep every night of high school because you feel invisible and unloved and even the people who say they love you only love you because they don’t really know you. It’s carving words into your skin in the shower because you just can’t feel it on the inside anymore. It’s sleeping with her boyfriend because you want so desperately to feel close to someone who gets it. It’s fishing trips with my Granddaddy. It’s the beach trip with my best friend and my dog. It’s spitting coke out of my nose laughing through my tears in the bathroom late at night. It’s suicide notes. It’s holding a gun in my hand and just wondering what it’d be like to put it to my temple and pull the trigger. It’s work and softball and school and people who don’t get it when I say “I don’t want to play anymore.” It’s being tired. It’s being exhausted physically and mentally. It’s being nearly throwng out of my house for dating a black guy. A black guy. A black guy. It’s being bombarded by constant racism. It’s small minded people. It’s aging grandmothers. It’s broken store fronts and trash. It’s my dog buried in my – their- front yard. It’s my other dog bured in my – their- front yard. It’s dead dogs on the sides of roads because no one believes in fences. It’s like a bad joke of 50 Shades of Grey. Because everything is gray. Red gray. Blue gray. Brown gray. Green gray. Maybe it’s just the filter of my misery. Maybe it’s just the hog shit. It’s a hotel room. It’s a bar. It’s another bar. It’s white Christian people who don’t actually know shit – except for some of them. It’s 98% or something like that in regards to smarticle particles. Don’t come here for the education. It’s the smell of jackets and cologne and strange houses. It’s the taste of a first drink. It’s the taste of Sundrop. It’s the lights and the music and the total inability to dance in the only club I’ve ever been too. It’s Christmas night alone by a sad fake tree after driving for 5.5 hours in the downpour of the century. It’s running over your puppy. It’s watching another puppy die because you can’t afford a vet. And you don’t really know what to do. It’s being alone. It’s a lot of painful memories. I hate coming home. I hate driving into the past and feeling the same way  that I felt as a teenager. I hate feeling those memories and smelling those smells and just being there. So, forgive me, when I say, I absolutely fucking hate that place.