Alone

I wrote this about three years ago. Its prompt was the lyrics from the Hootie and the Blowfish album Cracked Rear View.


Alone, on the road. I left my home and I don’t know why. It’s all I thought about these past five years on the road. Filled with the pain of the parting keeps me in eternal dusk and dawn. I never see the sun shine. Following the eternal trail of I know a guy who knows a guy, looking for work. I don’t know why I even try anymore. I always come with a few bucks and that’s the way I leave. Continually avoiding places I’ve been and pretending to have already been to the places I don’t want to go. I haven’t felt clean in all these five years. I’m covered in a dirt water can’t wash away. It’s come to the point where I don’t know why I continue to compromise myself for people I will never see again but I can’t swallow my pride and apologize to the ones I love? My mind is plagued with doubts. Are they still there? Will they want to see me? Can they ever forgive me? Of course I know the answers to all the questions but I let doubt linger. The big problem is I don’t think I can ever get things back to how they used to be.

I get off the bus in my hometown and walk down a deserted main street. It’s right before dawn and my world is dark. I spend the morning in a diner nursing a stomachache. I spend the rest of the day hiding behind a pair of sunglasses and a hat, walking to all the places I used to know by heart. Looking at them from the sidewalk or through a fence. Never touching or entering in. I only stay long enough to update the photographs in my mind. I walk my suitcase past my house a dozen times that day. I want to vomit each time I do so. I left there so loudly and with such confidence, and now to return so meekly doesn’t sit well with me. I end up planted on a bench just off the main street near the bus station. What made me think I could return? Too much time has passed, everything looks old. I feel older. What right do I have to inflict myself on these people again? As I stair at the bus station down the road someone sits next to me and in a familiar voice asks if I thought I could hid behind sunglasses my whole life. He claims that my face tells him everything and that I don’t have to say a word. He tells me that I’m wanted and cared about. I ask him if I can come home and that I want to try to be part of a family again.

“When did you stop?” my father asks. He reaches up and removes my sunglasses to expose my tears. We stand and he puts his arm around me and leads me home, and for the first time in five years I see the sun.