Home, Midwest

Wes Stabler

On dead-silent nights, I dream of a hollow Midwest. I walk a gravel path, electric tendrils humming songs of potential and hurt that radiate in the darkness of the night like a miasma of reckoning. Coursing through pulsating cells of streetlights and swarming gnats, shadows guide and strain my eyes, blurring the truth of every matter. Damp houses with lights but no memories remind me of the back porch where everything began, a calling from a place I have buried. As though bound to an intangible string of fate, I push through brisk, unwelcoming, wooden warnings. I have been living for something I have yet to know and praying that the intricacies of the earth will talk to me, sing to me, their harmonies reaching a corner of my soul known only to my most dreaded yet forgotten willows. I know that if they hear the song too, they’ll follow. I know this; it’s home.

Cold, crisp air and symphonies of crickets hum in the hours nobody else can know, a soothing escape from familiarity that excites me and fills me with hope. Traffic lights flicker with nobody to lead, save for a crow atop the pole. I venture further into overlooked streets, alleys, and yards, previously only concepts. The emptiness and howling wind sting my skin like the scratch marks on people and things I used to hold. Every step is like walking off a cliff’s edge, now occupying a fragment of my mind forever. The farther I venture, the more I feel free. Stray cats, raccoons, and possums step into the light to observe my journey. If I dared to greet them, stepping off my invisible white line, they would flee. I know this; it’s home.

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I wish to scream, pray to throw stones through windows and at power lines. I hope to run into the forest of brambles to find a fruit, a spider, a body, anything breaking my centrifugal conscience. The smiles and numbers of which I limit myself lose meaning as the golden leaves fall from their branches. I hope to find handprints in the soil of someone whose name is my past favorite flower. Valleys and ditches turn to paintings as minutes turn to miles. Every brush stroke in the grass is a reminder of my past self’s forgotten poetry. If the window’s shards draw blood, I will write of it all. I know this; it’s home.

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“Bold, be bold, be beautiful and new.” I begin to think new thoughts and step in directions that don’t exist, the world building itself at my feet. The cornfields and railroads almost say my name in the whispers of inhumed silence. “Bold, be bold, be someone worthy of tears.” I blink three times every step while walking to the pulse of a distant air conditioner. “Bold, be bold, break and pour yourself into all things.” Memorizing the patterns in the pavement gives me false hope. “Be bold, be beautiful, prove you’re not who anyone anticipates you to be.” The lake is there with no eyes to see. I know this; it’s home.

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I break into a run until my lungs fill with ice, the suffocation bringing me more life. I stumble onto a bike path with no end. Nobody is out here except me, my cold, fiery resolve, and a toad in the gravel. Pounding the ground, my legs remember anesthesia and perpetual motion, telling the earth, “Catch me if you can,” as if I don’t want it to. My coat becomes a reflection; its tail reaches out, creating no shadow, pleading for the hanger and the snow on the doormat. An hour ago wasn’t real, and neither was the bank nor the church. Every untouched stair and shrub and metal railing, is a cruel epithet of a life I will never live, things I will never hold, and lies I will never be told. It reminds me that I am left with nothing but the truth. I know this; it’s home.

I imagine what everyone would think: my teacher, my therapist, and lastly, my mother and my father, their collective cries harmonizing into some empty, vitriolic chord. I think of the empty chairs and the empty pill bottles: out of sight, but never out of mind. I think of the icy lungs, how the lake would dismember me from my mind down to my ankles, and how it would do the same to them. It’s as if I am already there, I am flooded, and I struggle to breathe, the fear of my labored realization bringing attention to my solitude. I can almost feel the hand on my shoulder, head, stomach, waist, leg, arm, and spine. I feel it in my thoughts, individuality, delusion, and my lungs filled with frost, melting and escaping me through an optical torrent. I begin to think of how much it would mean to him. I know this; it’s home.

My mind is reignited by twin caramel suns, siphoning light from the comets that streak across them, filling it with an immeasurably high universe. A universe of silk, endless dregs of gentle, pitch-black cataclysm. One thought of him, one seedling, takes root and absorbs correlation of any living concept of my being. It leaves no room for any infatuation but that of my personal night sky. The twin suns sear every thought, intertwining every purpose and experience. Suddenly, I see those stars in everything but the ones coating my shirt collar, and what I see in the constellations is everything I could have wanted: discovery, beauty, unfamiliarity, and new truth. I race backwards, filled with desperation, turning back through toads, streetlights, gnats, humming wires, crickets, and shadows. My gasps for cold air and flailing arms tell a story no scholar could write and no artist could paint. My wet footprints leave tales of completion in my wake, abandoning my hollow Midwest, collapsing like a star out of sight. I run past a mailbox and a rose bush, unwilling to take a second glance. The flag on the mailbox was up. I knew this; it was home.