I was looking at the picture of Indiana today. You know, and I guess I saw something that I hadn’t noticed before. I saw how the southern border is the connecting part to Kentucky—that ambling Ohio river that eats through the hills, licks against the banks. But that border, when I see it representing Indiana, gives me a kind of sickness for home. Whenever I used to see the figure of that border it was Kentucky to me and it still is but I’m seeing it from the other side. Like I’m the image in the mirror looking back. I guess it must be normal to feel the crazy need to strike out and leave things behind right alongside of an ache to be home—to see the sun sink below the same hills year after year.
sometimes one of the most important things you can learn is when to stop. not many people know when to stop too well. I’d say I’m pretty bad at it. I’m bad at stopping and going to tell the truth. But being bad at going doesn’t have the same psychological consequences as being bad at stopping. if you’re bad at going, you might be bored a lot and feel like there’s not much to do. The thing is, there was plenty to do but you flatly rejected it all. Not so bad though. You can get lots of books read by being bad at going, or learn how to play an instrument really well, because you’ll basically be stuck at home all the time. I had a girlfriend who was real bad at going. I visited her recently at her apartment. It was her day off work. She had told me the day before she was going to drive a half hour away to go check out a church in a nearby town, but when I found her she was in sweats and hadn’t left the apartment. She told me she didn’t intend on leaving the apartment for the rest of the weekend. It was saturday. She told me this because she was rejecting my idea of walking to get ice-cream. A walk that would have taken six minutes. She became agitated and said she had things to clean. So, I left. She was basically cleaning everything in the apartment, but there was nothing that she had cleaned more thoroughly than my clock. I walked back to my car in a kind of sluggish blur, going like a car at midnight without lights. I wanted to blame her for being bad at going. She had never let the lights come on between us. Just left us groping blindly for connection. But really it was all because I wasn’t good at stopping that I felt like a used McDonald’s bag, drifting idly across the streets. When I went to her place I had every intention of getting her back. And I knew it wouldn’t work. Even if I had saved her from dying by giving her a kidney she would have closed her eyes to me. In the apartment she had waved her arms like an air traffic controller and declared she was clearing the air of any idea of us getting back together. I hadn’t stayed around much longer after that. I had vague and mixed desires to leave the vapid state of Indiana as well. There really wasn’t anywhere to jettison the ablated feeling of rejection as I walked away in the hot summer sun.
