As I walked down the dimly lit street with my dog, we passed my brother-in-law at his friends house down the road. They were both sitting outside smoking, the light over the doorway made them clearly visible to me but they could not see me. The two of them seemed content with where they were, I did not listen to the words of the conversation just the tone. My neighbor seemed to have a dreamy happy tone, the two of them have been fixing up his house and it is starting to shape up nicely.
I knew why they could not see me, but it still made me feel less important. It got me thinking about all the changes in the town. From that point till now my small hometown feels like something that can only be recalled in memory. The feeling in the back of my neck is much like the one that brought me home from Portland. It is the call to move on.
August 2007 I moved back home, payed off piles of dept and got back into school. April 2008 I was asked to look after my father until my sister could get up from Pennsylvania. It turned out that it was unhealthy for my father to stay with my step mother. When I moved back from Portland the two biggest reasons were my father and my dog, who had put on about thirty pounds. My father lives with my sister in Pennsylvania and my dog is around a healthy weight.
My hometown no longer fits who I am. I am the man that can not be seen because of the light. If I get my degree before something holds me here, I will move where ever my heart takes me.
-NK
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3 comments:
Hey nka--you have a nice way of sort of shadow dancing in the writing. Reader can't quite put his finger on what's going on, but it's evocative in its evasiveness, and you sprinkle memorable lines throughout, the keepers here being:
"My hometown no longer fits who I am. I am the man that can not be seen because of the light."
Though those two sentences where not written until the end, they were the main idea of the piece. I had to pave the way to the line, otherwise the reader would have to make guess what I meant. The town has changed and I have accomplished what I came back to do. And the feeling I have about not fitting in the town anymore is the same as when I was not seen by my brother-in-law.
The hardest thing I am having with non-fiction is keeping it true to life. In a fiction piece I could have filled in the conversation that they where having even though I did not listen to it.
Sometimes in nonfiction, only a particular lie can convey some general truth. Sometimes you must withhold or softpedal facts, lest they give the wrong impression. That's not a greenlight for fiction, just a way of saying that truth is going to be slippery sometimes.
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