New Beginnings

I haul the last carton into the truck and heave a sigh.

The slated grey cobblestones that pave the crooked path smile at me with a twisted grin. The sun is drumming, beating the lush green canopy and I wrench the cover of the neon orange moving truck and seal it shut, the contents brimming like a foamy sea, ready to fall apart and below. 

I cross another tally mark in my mind as I jog towards the open door and long oblong mirrors, showing bloated visions of sky high buildings behind me.

It is not that I like moving every month or so, but closed walls are suffocating, constricting, they bind me in a cage, and I want-no need to leave.

I need to leave to the open wild, spend a night or so in the winding moon, and fiery starlight, the piercing grass below me, and enjoy isolation in its purest form.

I feel impure, surrounded by hordes of people, inquiring, questioning. I have spent an year in this town, with its huge forlorn buildings that touch the sky and the tips of skyscrapers that bathe in wet, puffy clouds on one side, and the small flattened rooms that struggle to grow and bloom from the earth on the other. This town irks me, it lacks equilibrium.

So, I quit my job and packed my bags, I bought a cargo truck to drive me away to the unknown again. Perhaps I should be feeling guilty, exploiting my dead parents' money on mindless pursuits of freedom and inner sanctity but it would have rotten and shriveled up anyway. 

Growing up, I lived with my grammy in the farmhouse, I toiled in the morning and slept in the blissful peace of night, crickets lulled me into a naive dreamland, like my grammy's gentle humming of an innocent lullaby. My parents were away, building their empire in business, they never saw me and I never saw them; it hurt sometimes, seeing the other kids scolded by their parents, but not recieving even one call from them when I stole money from my grammy. It's like they were dead, just ghosts from a distant memory, too close to forget and too far to reach out. I grew up with tanned skin and calloused palms. When my grammy died, my parents came a day after the cremation. I could never forgive them for that. They took me away after that, like a stranger who you should have known but don't, to a city similar to this town. I was a broken mess, too fragmented to heal, too distant to love. 

The people in my new city that my parents whisked me away to, were unfamiliar, with sophisticated speech, and jeering sneers. My parents might have grown up in the monstrous city, with its fast moving vehicles and shops as big as elephants, but I was a girl from the small, quaint village.

I was abandoned in an unfamiliar world.

That is the second thing I will never forgive them for.

Maybe my sudden impulses to move away now is because of my torn childhood.

Then my parents died a few years later in a car crash and my life became a gaping hole, so empty that it pulled pieces of my soul, tore it apart to fill the void festering inside of me.

I am moving back to the village now, it was the only place where I could sigh and laugh, where the open air caressed me, where everyone gave back to earth what they took.

It was the only place I could call home.