Today I’m going to visit a childhood friend for the New Year. She flew from Texas to spend the holidays with her family. When we were 10, we lived four blocks away from each other. I pretty much lived in her basement bedroom, spending our middle and high school years watching anime and developing interwoven fanfiction plots for Naruto. That basement was our home base for nearly 10 years. Now, her family lives two hours south in a city where they could actually afford a house. I’ve never been there.
I haven’t gone far from my hometown. This is for practical reasons — I didn’t want to be in debt during college, so I chose a community college and then a state college in commuting distance from my parents’ home. As long as I paid my tuition, I didn’t pay rent. I lived in the same house my whole childhood, so the neighbors who didn’t move away watched me grow up. The owners of local restaurants know me, know my face, ask after my parents. Sometimes I walk through housing developments that used to be open fields and try to paint the construction sites I used to play in on top of them. Where there is now a two car garage, there used to be a dirt pit and sewer pipes.
The public parks are smaller than I remember, the old wooden ones replaced with technicolor plastic (did you know that a lot of wood play structures are treated with arsenic?). Sometimes I still sit on the swings if there’s no one around. It’s strange to see old haunts. Duller than memory, quiet, but still there.
There’s a creek that runs past the edge of town. When I was young, you had to walk through open space to reach it. Now there’s a patchwork of roads, development only staunched by grazing land on the opposite bank. There are still coyotes, though. On cloudy days I took walks on the deserted paths, and met them along the way. They walk the roads and sidewalks when we aren’t there, easy loping gaits and knowing eyes. I think they know my face, too. The glance we exchange as we pass one another on the gravel path is the same one I exchange with my neighbors. I haven’t walked that path in a long time, I hope the coyotes are well.
from the pen of icarus blake 
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