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 I have about ten incomplete and unpublished drafts on here.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.

The House That Built Me

My parents often casually throw about the idea that they're going to move away from this place after my brother leaves home (which might be never, making my worries moot! ha). I always protest. Is it selfish that I don't want other people living in what is the closest thing I've got to a childhood home?

All my life, when we visited my grandma in the house my mom grew up in, I would sleep in Mom's old bedroom and play with Mom's old toys and read Mom's old books. I hugged her old worn-out-with-love teddy bear and looked through her yearbooks. My brother and I played her old board games and admired the pictures she'd hung up when she was our ages. As you can tell, my grandma never throws anything away.

I want my kids to have that.

But there are even more selfish reasons. I want a place to come home to that feels like home. My dad's parents are kind of opposite of my mom's and Dad's childhood home(s) are occupied by random people. Grandma and Grandpa built their own house in a totally different town. The house, while familiar, isn't home to Dad. He doesn't have a bedroom there and Grandma got rid of most of his stuff or stuck it away in the attic.

I want to be able to come home, to the place I call home, not just the house where my parents happen to live. Sometimes I think about how weird it will be coming home and sleeping in my bed as a visitor. If my bed still exists at that point...

I know my parent's happiness is what should be my priority, and if moving away is what makes them happy, then I should support it. But how can they not have any attachment to this place?

Maybe I'm growing overly sentimental since my time to move on with my life looms dangerously close or maybe I've heard this song one too many times on the radio, but I really want them to keep this house, my house. I'm afraid if they get rid of it and my room becomes somebody's home office, I'll lose all the memories attached to it. Seven years of my life, arguably the most significant ones yet, unfolded under this roof. The tangible wood and carpet and shingles tether me to something bigger, a whole person I identify with and might lose touch with later. How am I supposed to get her back if her home is gone?