to be in a time of return

to nap on a half-full flight. to be sat next to by a tall man in a cowboy hat regardless. to recite “prufrock” in your head before departing. to hug your mother’s husband. to realize that he smells like beer, but only a little bit, then to fear the drive home.

to wake up to a knock on the door. to hear that your grandparents have called. to call them, to miss them, to be called back. to smoke a cigar with the man who raised you who was not your father. to not tell your grandmother, lest you face her wrath and prayers. to be told to sit like a lady. to explain the things that make you tick, like gestures, intonation, and co-speech. to be met with a chorus of “bless your heart.” to, thankfully, be offered money, but to refuse it anyway because you’ve so carefully metered your stipend and refused yourself the therapy that you needed. need. to tell them that you’ve not time for boys, which is not technically a lie. to pray before a meal, to enjoy it wholly, and to realize how much you’ve missed the company. to feign support for a very angry, very orange man. to drive home safe.

to return to their home for sunday biscuits and jam. to wear skirts, and to skirt around the issues that nobody dares to face. to own at least five bibles. to smear a tinge of mauve-colored lipstick on a paper napkin and to reapply it while your grandmother takes out her curlers. to make the all-too-familiar drive to church. to be hugged by all the ladies who call you “sweetheart.” to question whether or not you should be offended by that one lady’s comment about your “slimmer” figure. to evil-eye the boy who sent you dick pics in the ninth grade and to question why you’d even have a boyfriend who’d send you dick pics in the ninth grade. to be called an abomination, albeit indirectly, and to be okay with that. to recite “prufrock”in your head while the preacher preaches. to be on the receiving end of a knowing wink from the only woman in church who wears pants. to return it. to remember why you do it all in the first place.

to trudge your way through christmas. to cry upon seeing your best friend. to drink top-shelf sake on his couch and watch cabaret. to stare at the ceiling and wonder why you’re here. to hike in the morning. to complain about christmas festivities on said hike. to drive past the places that destroyed you and to struggle through the tightening in your chest. to walk into the place that made you. to make your supporters proud. to make them proud under true pretenses (if that’s a thing). to make others proud under false pretenses because that’s just the arkansas way.

to create a delicate façade. to undo it all for therapy. to own your decisions regardless. to accept the context that informed your life, but to hate it nonetheless. to speak with a neurologist. to hear “bless you heart” sans malice from your neurologist. to have an mri and to recite “prufrock” in your head over the noise of the machine. to know that your brain was broken before you even got to use it. to fight to accept that unfortunate fact. to be grateful for what you have left. to accept condolences when they’re often. to know that hate crime does not define you, even when it feels like it does. 

to nurture—or, rather, attempt to nurture—a paper-thin relationship. to try to undo the undoable. to have a father after all this time, but only when things are good. to have things be good. to jolt awake to the sound of new year’s gunshots outside your window. to roll your eyes at the accompanying cries of “yee yee.” to accept tenuously-offered praise. to drive your car for the last time before going home. home-home. to sip on apple pie moonshine the night before a flight. to wear sunglasses to the airport because of said moonshine. to accept love when it is offered, even if it is offered under questionable conditions. to hate it all. to miss it nonetheless.

Process Notes: Before writing this, I made a list of things that I wanted to include. They were all statements that, for me, distilled my experience of coming home into a series of moments. I was greatly inspired by Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” specifically her statement that poetry is a “distillation of experience.” I tried to play around with language, as well, in order to give this work some semblance of form. It ended up being much longer than I meant for it to be and ended up going in a few different directions, but the role of those Southern sayings (read: insults) ties it to my topic. At first, I tried to do punctuation in the style of Adnan, but the commas felt like they conveyed a form of continuation that wasn’t working with my vision for the piece, so I compromised by maintaining her Linguistic style, but by employing periods instead of commas. I chose to work only in lowercase letters because it felt very stripped-down, just like the style that I was writing in. Ultimately, I like the way that this turned out. I found myself talking about some really difficult parts of my life, but it felt appropriate here.