hometown - 03/20/2025
2 days ago I left my parents' house for an hour and one minute to run 5.35 miles at a moderate pace. Now, I sit in the backseat of a rental car with my mother driving and my little brother in front. We are careening across the Pennsylvanian countryside in our little chitty-chitty carbide coffin. En route to the place I was raised for the better half of my childhood: Youngstown, Ohio. It's always great to return, because Youngstown never looks much different from one visit to the next, and what differences appear do so in-character. Blown-out buildings and roads with potholes as big as canyons are everywhere around here, and everyone is that same salt-of-the-earth type (a term I've always found distasteful on account of mostly hearing it used by the high-class to describe the 'unrefined righteousness' of the lower ones). It is the Rust Belt, after all, and those borne of it are bound to have some rub off them as they crawl out from its great, corroded womb that whistles when the wind blows through and smells like cigarettes forever. This is the womb which industry has given us to nurture our young, and these lands to raise them on, discolored and decayed as they may be.
It's funny how stark the transition is between where I've been living for the past 6-ish years (DMV represent) and back here. The sky has gotten greyer the closer we get to Y-Town. All the grass turns brown. The roads get worse and begin to overpopulate with blockades and cones and 16-thousand-wheelers transporting Material™ for Company LLC. It gets colder and rainier and dirtier. One in every five places around feel like they were ripped from a years at-least two decades away. It's a mystery why it always feels so nice to come back every time, beyond the fact that it is home and home is safe, no matter how many prostitutes get kidnapped and murdered a block away from my Grandpa's apartment. That and it doesn't stink of the hipster wannabe-rich and rich wannabe-gangsters that infest my parents' town.
After I moved away from Youngstown at age 7 to live in Chicagoland for a few years, I experienced a great deal of turmoil. But my saving grace was whenever I got to come back to Ohio to visit my grandparents. There, I was safe. Later, I had some experiences after moving back to Youngstown that infected it with similar feelings as everywhere else, but I guess the residual positivity still lingers somewhere. that's the thing with growing up troubled - home means something different to you than other people. It perverts and morphs and becomes foreign. Like so many other things, it becomes something belonging distinctly to other people and not to you. a symbol of better living.
departure - 03/23/2025
Well, the endcap of my childhood has concluded. Within the next month I will leave my parents' house for good to attend Basic Military Training in San Antonio, Texas. My grandparents have always been my second and third parents, the first being my mother - though I spent time with them rather equally in my early years when my mother was often out working two or three jobs and dating around. Nothing to blame her for, because she stuck by me when my father walked out and money was tight enough she had to starve to feed us. She's not perfect, but she's gone through a lot, with me and without. She's a lot like my grandmother in this way - both women who have gone through so much. My grandmother, who left her homeland and her family and her friends and her whole world behind to come to America with a man who would eventually become my grandfather. It was only yesterday that I realized, when she retold me the pain of leaving her parents, that I too had to leave my parents behind as a boy. So much loss has plagued my family for generations. I can only hope for brighter days ahead for us all.
victory lap - 04/07/2025
I went back to my old job today to visit my former coworkers. It's such a funny feeling looking back on old places and old friends and old memories. Like whole different lives you lived. A lot of it can tug at your heartstrings, because you've done so much with these people and then you selfishly expect their worlds to stop spinning when you leave them for one reason or another. When you come back to see them just as they were, it can feel a lot like you were never really there at all.
I think that's one of the biggest hardships of growing up. It's not just swallowing carefree days of doing nothing or the idea that the world revolves around you. It's the exits, quiet and unobtrusive and sometimes so gradual it becomes less a jump-cut and more a fade-to-black. You can tell yourself you're okay with change and you welcome it with open arms like an old friend. But when it arrives - the last train or plane or cab out of this chapter and into the next - all truths are laid bare. Just as the beast of change terrifies - dangling your entire life over a deep, impenetrable abyss and shaking it to see what might fall loose - so too does it reveal exactly what you're closing the door on. Maybe that clarity is the scariest part. Not the uncertainties that lie ahead, but knowing the realities of where you've been all this time - right as you say goodbye.