Now it's time to ramble on

I can never go home. I returned to Shallotte to visit some friends, and in the process realized that I am never going to be able to return to the places where I felt most at home. Mr. Jim's has been gutted out. I looked inside the window at the store where I put in over a year of my life and saw that the walk in, oven and everything else is gone. And it will never be back. Mr. Jim's is dead now. I don't think anybody understands how heartbreaking that is. And the trailer where my wife and I lived for the first six months of out marriage. No place has ever felt more like home, and though it still stands, I can't go back. Even if I could, it would not be the same house. Same goes for my room at my parents' house. I never realized that I had such affection for Shallotte, and now it has been ripped away. And I did it to myself. I have so many memories and good times there and I will never be able to live like that again. Everyone has moved on. Shallotte is growing and changing every day. If I go back twenty years from now, shallotte as I knew it will be as faded and distorted as my memories will be by then.

Some people can go home. They could move back in with their parents and resume working at their first favorite job. Mine is gone. My parents' house is still there, but most everything else is gone. And I know that I may at some point forge an attatchment like that to Wilmington, but I'll have to leave that before too long as well.

On a more buoyant note, the semester is winding down. I'll get some time to breathe in a few weeks. They're going to start paying people to kill coyotes in Brunswick county, so I'm gonna kill one over winter break. And I found out that if I set my alarm clock to radio I am more likely to actually get up when it goes off.

That's all for today, I guess. Just wanted to write about my first bout of homesickness. Where is home for you?