So I was driving south for Easter, and as I wound my way through the hills between York and Sharon, SC I was hit with a moment of melancholy. You see, Thomas Wolfe, he’s a bit of a motherfucker. Stupid prescient motherfucker, to be specific. Because I can’t go home again. I love my family, we for the most part get along great, but I could never live in rural SC again. Aside from the fact that I can’t fathom living somewhere without high speed internet access, it’s just not who I am.
As I’ve grown older, and especially over the last year with the deaths of my grandmother, uncle and a close neighbor, I feel increasingly alien in this world that I grew up in. It’s not like this is a new thing, the feeling first hit me my freshman year of college when my grandfather died, closely followed by three elderly people from the community I grew up, a neighbor, my friend’s grandmother and an elder in our church. I remember a feeling of detachment from my surroundings, and thinking “Is this what it means to grow up?”
Now I think that it’s not exactly what it means to grow up, but it is a part of growing older. The attachments we form with people, no matter how strong, are transitive. My closest friends from college are people I have hardly seen since then, and many of my best friends now are people I’ve seen face to face once or twice, and we mostly communicate on the internets. Interesting.
I guess it’s just a little melancholy tinge to my trips home because of the changes in the past year, but that’s the only constant, isn’t it?
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