EVERYONE'S RUNNING FROM SOMETHING
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Down the new bridge, a concrete giant reaching seemingly 100 feet over the water, towards the traffic light, you can just see the first quarter mile ribbon of ashphalt that runs south to the Southwestern most point in Mississippi. The street names familiar even after thirty plus years. Carrol, Demontluzin, Bookter, Washington. Past the turreted Cathedral (or is it just a Church?) where I received a diploma and attended the funeral of both my best friends parents, some 16 years later, and after 11 more, pulled myself out of the gulf, momentarily fulfilled. Past the school for boys, proudly founded in 1854, where the length of your hair was used to determine your godliness. Certainly anything over the collar meant you were going to hell. What a fucking joke.

Today I am running here. In a small town I came to every day for six years. 3 in a carpool car, 3 more in my own. Sometimes tardy from the train that seemed to run every day at 7:05 am, right when you were to be there. Memories trickling in, as time has a way of keeping the flood at bay. Past a street where a girl three years older lived. A wet palmed phone call. A date.

She lives here still. A lot of them do and it makes me consider the prospect of existing in the same 3-4 square miles for the majority of one's life. It has to be comforting. I imagine when they were young it felt suffocating. My only goal was to get away from here. As is the case with most things we run from, it's almost never about the place. What could sleepy beach towns do to a 17 year old to make him not want to return?

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Where I ran to is now a place worth running from. Crime riddled and regressing. The people, seemingly it's only asset and hope. The lens I view it through widened from 30 years ago where my existence was also 3-4 square miles. A handful of bars. Good friends. Music. A woman I still love with all my heart. That should be enough, right? It should.

Time it seems can jade most things. My days a battle against a feeling that I have to get out of this place. Familiar feelings. Feelings that forced a 17 year old away and that seem to draw him back the quiet brown water and sandy beaches he ran from 33 years ago. It still feels a little bigger than leaving a place. Deeper. Fraught. It's likely leftover from the things not dealt with over the decades. A catalog of items now. A garden of weeds, ensconced, pull one and four more pop up, entangle, and continue to constrict. So many that even when widening that same lens, the truth is covered, almost choked out. If we quieten ourselves and focus, we can almost hear it, whispering. We lean in.

"Everyone's running from something." It creaks.

"Everyone's running from something."

#hugsandhi5s