Knots;College

There’s a knot in your chest, placed neatly beside your heart.

Maybe it’s something you should be worried about, who knows. All you know is that there’s nothing left for you in this town anymore.

But you stay in town anyways, and don’t think about what brought you back here in the first place.

Because it’s better that way. Easier.

You swore to never return to this place again but feelings fester, and explode, and it can't be fixed if you don’t actually address it.

But here you are again, in the one place they cannot find you.

You wonder how you got here, what the hell you’d been thinking when you stormed out into the snow. Thirteen years ago your father did the same.

Most things we do are learned behavior.

Maybe that’s why you’re back in this stupid fucking town, and not anywhere else in the world.

Maybe that’s why your chest aches like someone kicked you into the ground.

You wish, not for the first time, that you hadn’t come back here.

The pervasive nature of small town America loves to stick with you despite your best efforts. Like a burr clinging to uniform socks, or a tic to a wildcat.

The taint of your childhood clings onto you like wisps of smoke onto an addict. You know this better than any of your friends who you left at the dorm at midnight on a Tuesday during winter break.

When you inhale, the air tastes like the feeling of jumping off the old dock back in Montana, picking wild rice from the water. You were not a woman then but rather something else, long dark hair and tan from the sun with chipped purple nails. 

Your lungs stutter, It hurts. 

You can’t remember life without the pins and needles in your sternum. They at least stay consistent, you suppose.

The town has always stayed the same too, things are stagnant here. Nothing here moves quite right, like a rusty old machine in need of oil or a new part. Even the trains screech like being here physically hurts them.

Someone once told you sophomore year of college would kick your ass. 

They didn’t say anything about the feeling of discontent it would leave behind. Of failure that stabs deep into your ribs and burrows its way through the bone. 

Does it even matter at the end of the day?

You’re going to find a way out of this town, even if it kills you, and god knows it might.

It genuinely might.