The house didn’t quite look the same.
Unfamiliar cars in the drive, broken shingles on the roof. Big slide in the back that spirals down to the pool. Nothing is like I remember. I notice that the neighbors who cut my hair in the sixth grade are selling their house. I think it’s good. We aren’t the only ones who made it out.
This is Rockwood Drive.
This is where we lived while they were building my family’s house in Shorebrook – the posh subdivision in this small town of less than 4,000.
“Not that much less,” I told myself once, but it’s different now. I think this town gets a bit smaller every time I come back.
The school still looks the same, but bigger – but smaller. Our house in Shorebrook looks the same as it did before I got that frantic call from my mother. Before the bank took it away. There is a fence around it now - and a pool.
The Pizza place is still here, still denoted as “worst job” in the footnotes of my life. I’m sure the inside hasn’t changed either. Same goofy window paintings of people eating pizza on the outside – what should make me believe that the inside doesn’t have anything less than the same shitty pizza it did seven years ago? I’m tempted to go in, but afraid. I have this self-diagnosed “social dysfunction.”
It’s odd, and I really don’t understand it, but when I go home I am constantly worried about running into someone I know. Someone I went to High School with. God forbid, an ex-girlfriend. The weird thing is, underneath, or on the same level as all this fear is a hope that I actually will run into an old friend or flame.
I imagine myself telling them off. Rubbing it in their faces – how I left this little shit town.
I imagine them excitedly saying “You’re in advertising?”
Or
“Oh, you got the Civic Si.”
Maybe one would think, ‘I should have never left you.’
I almost immediately feel like an idiot. I can even feel my face turning red from embarrassment; though, there is no one there to see anyway. Am I really any different then I was then? After all, it was all of six years ago. How much could a person change in such a short amount of time?
I feel defeated. As big a dork as I’d been in the eleventh grade. At the prom. Not dancing. Not smoking pot. Dropping acid. Having sex. Not doing anything that I thought the cool kids were doing.
The Jeep in front of me at the drive-thru is missing the glass in the back. The gaping hole where the window is covered by a trash bag held on by some duct tape.
“Fucking rednecks.” I mutter to myself.
Am I any different though? It is as if my past, pent up teen angst and all, is veiled by some garbage bag held up by a couple of silver strips of duct tape. I can’t really remember much about anything – even when I concentrate. My memories are crystallized shadows. Some seem worse than they probably actually were. Some seem better. It all just depends on which way the wind blows the bag that day.
On my way home, I catch up with the Redneck Jeep - it’s faux, frosted rear window flapping in the wind. I think about passing it. But what’s the point?
I don’t think I’m ready to take off the plastic and replace the window yet. Glass that clear can come at a high price. Maybe one day.
I think about it again, drop into fourth, and I watch that beat up black Jeep fade away over the horizon in my rearview, and yeah, it feels pretty good.

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