This is Your Captain Speaking

Where are you right now? In an office full of people staring blankly at their monitors? Are you surfing the net in one of those corner stores that have a computer crammed beside an ATM for 2$ a minute? Maybe you're beautiful, laying on a bed with your laptop, in a state of undress, thinking about me. Perhaps you're in prison. Or maybe you didn't intend on coming here at all. LIke several people a day, you arrived here purely by accident when you were googling "tall women stories." Whatever the case, you're here, and I welcome you; it's been some time.

I am writing this in row 31, seat B, flight 299, originating out of the home town, 30,000 feet in the air, somewhere over Canada, and on my way back home. After a week of sitting in my dad's red leather lazy-boy, feasting on a steady diet of satellite cinema and 15oz steaks, consuming mass amounts of alcohol pool-side, and staring at the streets that used to contain my penchant for speed and fury, I am looking forward to getting home and resuming my urban ways. The band I play in has two amazing shows booked over the next two weeks, I have a meeting scheduled with the editor of my favorite city weekly, due to start publishing again at the beginning of September, and there are two parties to go to this weekend. And Vernice, despite emailing me when I was away, saying she never wanted to see me again after finding out I was skinny dipping with Frannie, is taking me out for dinner tomorrow. God it feels good to be on my way home.

I can't believe I lived in that little city for as long as I did. Fashion doesn't exist, the cars are all mid-size domestics, and the cuisine lacks in variety. My friends are racist, and essentially, drug addicts. Other than sitting together in neutral colored couches, sniffing, smoking, and rarely drinking, they go nowhere, and I found myself slowly falling into the couch trap upon my arrival. Earl said I had the hometown fever. Nothing changes there, but each time I return, it seems increasingly distant. The camaraderie that petty crime and drugs used to supply me with seems further from reach each time I sit down with the people that have known me the longest. I feel guilty for not appreciating their efforts to keep things the same, and mostly, I fall silent, and want to return to the way things are, and what I have become. They are there, and I am here, and as time and distance separate us with every passing year, it gets harder to appreciate and understand what ever made us friends in the first place, and the hometown becomes just another place.