A Long Ride Home

  It was three days. Three sleepless, penniless days. I felt like it had aged me two years. Four, if you count the night before. I had spent that night in a tiny little hotel room, barely big enough to contain the shattered fragments of my ego. I stared up at the ceiling,feeling the city around me, and praying for sleep.

  My bus would head out from Port Authority at 11:00 the next morning. Back home. Damn. I had proclaimed so proudly my disdain for the locals in the area I had been raised in. Here I was now, slinking back back home. Back to them, back to that life, with tail planted firmly between my legs. I felt so foolish.

  Still, though, I miss that feeling. That almost manic, on top of the world feeling. I call it 'playing the rock star'. Leaving my little hick town home, I had felt good. Full of pride, and ... bravado, yes, that's the right word. It had been the first time in memory that I had felt good about myself.

  Waking up about an hour after I'd fallen asleep, I remembered myself as I had been before. A fragile person; small and insecure. Once again I walked with my head down, avoiding eye contact, praying no one would speak to me.

  I was on the bus. Buying the ticket, and boarding had nearly put me into hysterics. The angry black man loading my luggage. He had swore at me. The woman at the window had pegged me instantly as a 'tourist' in the city. Of course I am, I thought bitterly. Why the hell do you think I'm trying to get out of this damn place? I became sour, and cursed these people.

  Two hispanic women who claimed to be 'strippers' (and fooled no one) talked loudly to each other, comparing penis sizes of the thousands of men they had slept with. As the bus headed into the setting sun, a child began to cry loudly. Fantastic. At least my sense of sarcasm is still intact, I thought.

  Lack of money had resulted in a lack of food. Anxiety had caused me to miss sleep. By about 3 in the morning of the second night I began to hallucinate. Not a fullscale acid trip, but things certainly were not right. Shapes in the dark became other things, and lines blurred The bus driver's face took on grotesque shapes (something vaguely piglike - out of a movie, almost) and I focused on the landscape. The moon. It was red. Not a rusty harvest color, but a real red.

  I remembered it was my birthday.

  Completely exhausted I finally slept. Only about half an hour, but it had raised my morale from edging into suicidal to just dismal.

  We stopped at a highway gas station, and I bummed a smoke off a fat businessman. He grudgingly held out his pack, and I took the cigarette from him. I thanked him, probably too much. I must've looked psychotic. My hair was a mess, and I felt dirty. I'm sure my eyes were glassy and distant, and I'd been wearing the same clothes for three days at this point.

  I had totally forgotten how open the midwestern sky was. It gave me vertigo just to look around. The rise of buildings seemed limitless in the city. The sky was just a median between them serving as a guide, only vaguely defining 'up'.

  During an eight hour layover in Ohio I was bumming another cigarette when an older man asked me for change from a twenty. I told him, rather snied, that I didn't have a dime to my name. He gave me a dollar and another cigarette. I took them, feeling ashamed, and bought a can of soda and some stale potato chips from the bus station vending machine. It made me feel better.

  The bus that would take me from Akron back home finally left, and I drifted in and out of sleep. I woke abruptly, irrationally nervous that I had missed my stop.

  It was such a strange feeling, walking around my former home again. After all this time it felt foreign and familiar at the same time. Everything was where I had left it, but I had changed. I guess that's the point - the only constant is change.

  Where we come from is not the same place we return to. We can never go home again, and we can only ever be the sum of our experiences. Never more or less.

  Sometimes it makes me sad to think that we can never be more than what we have made ourselves. That I am a mass of mistakes, of pride under false pretense, of regret and indecision. How can I ever call myself a good person, knowing the lies I've told? How can I call myself a man, and still make these mistakes?

I don't have the first damn clue.