The Way Around Home: A Piece from Spring 2024

There’s a tear in the clouds.

I catch it as the road rushes past me like an amber-cast river. My eyes flit from traffic to sky, traffic to sky, noting how the light rips through the horizon’s membrane like a broken egg yolk. It’s ironic how this rich color brings me home while I’m driving in the opposite direction, but I jerk my mind back to my destination because college, not home, will spell my next two months. I try to focus on the road ahead. The white of the egg cascades into the surrounding dimness before me, but I spiral into the runny, Titian tear anyway. 

Where will I end up after I graduate? What will splitting up look like? Is this really all there is? I relive the last four years as surely as my Toyota Matrix relives the route back to campus—maybe less certain, however, as an anxious blush overtakes my cheeks. My family’s homestead fades with the sun. My grip on the steering wheel tightens. Not long ago I’d have given anything to escape college; now it seems I want to chase it back in time, press pause, make it wait for me to figure out what’s next.

An angry truck speeds by, scolding me to pay attention. Looking too far ahead, even to admire the sunset, is dangerous when I’m traveling so fast. I have better things to do when I get back, after all. I’ll have to unpack. I’ll have to tidy my dorm room, maybe do some laundry.

I realize I’ll have to wash my towel, and a stray, cirrus memory feathers through me. An unbidden pang tolls in my chest. 

My family used to have these towels, black and white, whose ugly, slithering pattern rendered them candidates for my university education. They were promptly thrown out of the house and into my abysmal dorm room, where they rotted under the reign of poor ventilation. They weren’t always mine, but they are now. I guess it’d never crossed my mind before.

-

The tear mends itself.

I wonder if it uses a needle and thread, fixing the gloaming, taking away the brightness. I wonder if it hurts. My sunglasses clatter into the holder above me, and my fingers brush against the photo tucked into my visor. I’m just a little girl there, playing with my siblings, though it’s hard to see past the white streaks of heat damage on the paper, which mar the glossy kaolinite. I veer toward my next exit, averting my gaze from the visor.

It’s a miracle I have this photo at all. It’s the paper survivor of a digital house fire I started two years ago.

I take the exit, merging smoothly into the next road. The sky’s egg-yolk orange has since faded into ochre, but it still burns, reminding me of my arson. Maybe I wouldn’t be driving this long road if I’d burned everything. Maybe graduation’s scales would tip and leaving would be a relief, a sweet drop of water, not lighter fluid on this dry wood, not a dreadful question:

Where will you go and who will go with you?

But my clothes would be a lot darker, as they were sophomore year. The bags under my eyes would be a sickly shade of plum. I’d be sitting at my computer, phone in hand, wondering a second time whether I should throw it all away. Take everything. Leave nothing. It’d been cathartic then and surely it’d be just as macabre and euphoric now, and maybe my hand would hover over the keyboard for a moment. But the hollow in me, that feeling only grief can cause, would swell. I’d press “delete.” Every single photo would turn to volcanic ash in the cloud. Every social app would melt away, every single new message dead coals. But that’s the point: even if no one ever noticed its antithetical predecessor, they’ll notice this vacancy. 

I needed that then. A recent death had forced me into someone I didn’t want to be, and I wanted a cleansing and a rewrite. In this emptiness, I wanted to touch my face and feel my skin and know it was me. Maybe absence is the most tangible thing there is—because when I close my hand around nothing I feel its loss in me instead of on me. So I disappeared from my friends for months. Maybe those towels’ ugly, slithering patterns are more gray than black and white. I guess I haven’t noticed, and that makes my heart sink.

I see a sign with my university’s name on it, and I let off—let go of—the gas. I’m glad that, since then, I’ve learned some photos are worth keeping and looking at every once in a while. My Toyota seems to purr its agreement.

I’m almost home now.

-

I forget the tear.

The smattering of clouds above me is seamless, as if light had never touched it. I want to say I know better, but as I drive its memory fades with the sun. The soft rush on either shoulder of the Ohio backroads sways in a pas de deux with the March wind. I can hardly make out the cornfields beyond, and the university’s water tower rises amid the oak canopy like a curved, plastic question mark.

I pull into the parking lot, and the hum of my car ceases. I remember, again, my laundry’s been waiting for me.

When those towels fell under my custody, no one thought anything of it. They’re old and ugly, and I needed them and it was a good excuse for my mom to purchase new ones for the family home. Otherwise, who knows? Maybe they’d have been burned. But I wonder if anyone in my family ever remembers them, remembers how they used to hang on the iron hooks in the bathroom. Do they ever recall walking by them? Seeing them through the mirror as they brushed their teeth?

I wonder if anyone thinks about it.