The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

I've been having trouble writing lately. I have about ten incomplete and unpublished drafts on here. The truth is when I'm at home, I become a lazy shell of a person who doesn't do anything but watch television and play video games and occasionally crack open a book. I really don't like this person. Which is why I can't stay here in this soul sucking little town.

That might seem like a harsh thing to call it. But I'm reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and it's about people with active, introspective, dreaming minds living in a soul sucking little town. The meager, poor town is completely devoid of opportunity and wreaks of ignorance, racism, and hopelessness. I don't live in the World War 2 era South, but I live in the closet modern day approximation. I can relate to the restless souls roaming the unnamed little town's dusty avenues. They feel totally isolated, alone in their thoughts and pining over unachievable dreams.

But the thing that gives me hope is that I'm not a character in the novel--I do have a future and my dreams are attainable. I get to leave. At home, my mind becomes a wasteland of sitcoms and football stats. At school, it's full of poetry and philosophy and grand pictures of what the future has in store for me. If I stayed home, I would never survive. Like Biff, Mick, Singer, and Dr. Copeland in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, I am not made for this containment; I am not content with what little this place has to offer me. It stifles me; it kills me.

There are upsides to small town America, and people tend to claim it is only my youth that drives me away; middle age will have me crawling back again with 2.5 kids, a mini-van, and a born again religion. But I know that isn't true. It's more than the slow pace, getting stuck behind tractors, driving hours for entertainment; it's the feel of the people and the despair in the air. There are no possibilities here. People work the same minimum wage jobs from the time they're born to the time they die. There is no room to think, to grow, to evolve. I valued that capacity when I was eight, and I am sure I will still value it when I'm eighty. I can't bear to spend any time more than Christmas vacations and summers here.

I love my parents and brother, and I cherish spending time with them. But outside of my family, I am completely lonely here. There is nothing, no one here for me. I exist in a different space now, and I can't fit in here anymore.

My heart is a lonely hunter, and there's nothing to be hunted in this desolate place.