I seriously thought about burning the fucking thing to the ground. And that's healthy.
See that? My old house. I was back in my hometown this weekend, because I needed to get away from the shit storm that is my personal life right now. I had the most awesomest time. I saw people I have not seen in decades. We had drinks. We laughed. I learned things about my friends that I did not know when we were all young together, mostly because I did not actually talk to people back then, because it was painful. Instead I was funny, and somehow I (mostly) successfully passed that off as conversation.
So Sunday morning I said my goodbyes, and there were hugs and exchanges of contact information and promises to keep in touch, and I decided to grab a cup of coffee and take a drive around my old hometown. Cue the Bruce Springsteen soundtrack. First up, my old high school:
It did NOT look like this when I went there.
When I went to Conroe High School, it looked as though the state of Texas had collected a bunch of old institutional buildings, like, say, prison blocks, mashed them together, threw some linoleum down on the floor, spent a great deal of time searching for the most outrageously cheap and probably dangerous cafeteria food, and told us all to show up Monday thru Friday, from 7:30am to 2:30pm. Now it looks like the Parthenon. I didn't get to go inside to see what changes they'd made to the interior, because it was Sunday and the school was closed, and it was locked up pretty tight, and I know this because I spent several minutes looking for a way in, and apparently that whole time I wasn't thinking about what a middle-aged guy trying to get into a high school on a Sunday morning might look like to a passer-by. No police were involved. High school: check. Time to move on to the cemetery.
This is my father's gravestone. Don't make it weird. It would be weird only if I put up a pic of another guy's headstone who WASN'T my dad, but I liked his name more, or he had a pithy quote on his stone that made me giggle. That WOULD be weird.
I don't often get back to Conroe, but every time I do I come here. It's not a sad moment. It's just a reminder that I'm above ground and he's not, because he made a choice that I will never make, because my kid is awesome and she thinks I'm awesome, and he missed out because she would have charmed the shit out of him. Cemetery: check. Last stop:
Wow. I thought it was a shit hole when I lived there.
Turns out it's abandoned now. It's ridiculously overgrown; there's trash in the driveway. I actually felt pity for this place, this inanimate building where I lived, and my childhood died, and my sister's too. Look at it. We've all moved on. It's still dying. I wanted nothing more than to put this awful place out of its misery, and if I'd had some accelerant and a lighter you might be looking at a very different picture. (Dear cops: in the highly unlikely event that something DOES happen to that place, it wasn't me. As far as you know.)
That was never home, anyway. Home is not that building you live in (that's just where you sleep. Sometimes.) Home isn't what, it's who. It's your best bud who had a crazy uncle with a Delorean, and for one glorious week during our senior year, he let us drive that fucking thing to school. It's your pal who was a couple years behind you, and you haven't seen him in literally, like 19 years, and he invites you into his home for the weekend as if you were just there last month. It's your beautiful friend who is still beautiful, and you find out that, even while you were having a truly grisly childhood, she was having one, also. And you never knew. And it makes you love her even more. THAT'S the home I choose to remember, y'all. Those guys were my home.
So, yeah. I can go home again.
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