hometown is where your skinned knees get bandaided and where your dad teases you until you cry. it’s where you have that first friend, the one you barely remember, that you have nothing in common with except that you are in the same place at the same time in your front yard playing hide and seek, playing kidnapped, but she always says your boyfriends save you. hometown is where you find grass stains and easter eggs and quick little lizards and muddy feet in new rainy puddles. it’s where the little boy who moves in next door leaves a gumball machine ring on your doorstep and it makes your stomach feel weird and you don’t talk to him for days and then when you do, it’s like it never happened. it’s crying so hard on the first day of kindergarten that your mom has to run out and let the teacher hold onto you so you don’t come after her and she sits in her car in the parking lot and cries just as hard and just doesn’t ever tell you. hometown is where you play losing baseball games in the freezing rain and dance in soft pink shoes on a stage that swallows you in its proscenium mouth.

hometown is where your legs get longer and you touch yourself without knowing anything about it and kids get mean in subtler ways. and your body turns into something else, and you look stupid and you hate everything and you start high school all alone. and your skin explodes and you wonder how lips taste in a movie theater. and when escapism turns from imagination into bodies and chemicals nobody holds it against you. and when you have those nights when you’re sure you’ve fucked everything up, that nobody will ever speak to you again, you wake up and nothing has changed. and after building and building and building, you can press your mouth into your best friend’s mouth and feel like everything is going to be okay. and your bodies are like one thing cut in two, and you fit back together as though you’ve never been apart. and your futures start in different cities.

hometown is that place from which you uproot yourself, all the preparation but no ceremony. where you tear up the landscape and try to transplant someplace else because, for whatever reason, there’s something you’ve got to do there that you just couldn’t do where you were. hometown is the beaten paths in your bones, that place whose streets you can drive asleep, from your house to his house, and you put it all in a time capsule and get your little black car on a highway to meet streets you’ve never heard of, whose signs don’t mean anything to you yet. you cut yourself out of your house and all your aunts and uncles talk like it’s good and it’s right and it doesn’t hurt, and those eighteen years you sucked out of your parents’ lives, you just take with you, leaving them empty-handed to answer your biweekly phone calls. you pack up the parts of you that you want to keep, (the cool lighter, the clever books) and leave the rest like a shrine. and maybe your parents quietly reunite without holding you in the middle.

hometown is what you sometimes visit, coming back for holidays and filling the kitchen with good smells and pie dough, continually bumping into your mother with such a sweet familiarity that your eyes fill up and then you salt what you’re stirring. you’re outside it, a guest, and your room is clean like a hotel with dimly remembered pastels and ponies. hometown is where you and yours can be in the same town for more than just a quick visit, racking up across-town miles daily rather than cross-country maybe monthly. where you can talk about the future while the past holds onto you without argument.

hometown is hundreds of miles away from the home you’re trying to make, with your futures realigned, clicking into place like magnets. home is a place on the third floor with the smell that’s the both of you mixed together, half for half, and it’s familiar and new and exhilarating and common. and you dance around the acquisition of things, of shared experiences, of beginnings and beginnings of middles and middles. hometown is dusty and far away, your mom’s photo albums, but home is fresh and vivid and stomach-clenching, the newest normal, until it becomes the regular normal, and comfortable and well-lived, with cats, full of shared space and day to day eye contact.

hometown is what this home will be to somebody new, the blank person you’ll want to make so you can teach each other about the world, and that will be something you do not have in common. your hometown will be separated from this real world by five hour car rides, but with grandparents at the end to make it worth being patient and not whining and kicking the backs of the front seats. hometown is where your mom will still keep bandaids, just in case, and wrap the christmas presents she puts in the mail. even when your person, who is no longer blank, gets torn up inside and you have to hold them and watch them try to put themselves together because you won’t be able to do it for them, and even when they pull eighteen years out of you and pack up who they want to be to take with them, and even when they leave you with only a shrine and empty hands, you will still use that empty to hold a telephone when they want you to. and hometown will still be there, through your cordless lifeline, with empty hands of their own.