I could hear the city around me as I headed for my car, but the sound was muted thing, something you could relax into while you did your business, not the raucous interuption it\u2019s usually assumed to be by people who don\u2019t know any better. For the last dozen years, it had become the sound that told me life was still going on around me. The sun was going down as I made it onto open highway out of town, the glow of it changing the black of the highway into the faded near-white yellow of an old cotton sundress. I spent an hour squinting into the indirect glare, another squinting through the dusk, and finally started to relax into the zen non-thought of night driving.
\nMy mind wandered, carefully avoiding the tar-pit surrounding the reason for this drive. None of that made any sense, and it wasn\u2019t going to make any more sense with eight hours of poking at a uselessly small pile of information. There were, at any rate, other things I could think about.
\nIn one sense, I didn\u2019t know exactly what to expect when I got home; it had been eighteen months since my last visit and a year had gone by before that. In another sense I knew exactly what to expect because nothing ever seemed to change in a place you\u2019d lived for twenty years — not the things that you remembered as important at any rate.
\nThe important things that I remembered didn\u2019t involve words like \u201cwe can\u2019t find your dad\u201d<\/i> and \u201ceverything\u2019s so strange\u201d<\/i>. That was the thought that came back to check up on me after every few mile markers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I could hear the city around me as I headed for my car, but the sound was muted thing, something you could relax into while you did your business, not the raucous interuption it\u2019s usually assumed to be by people who don\u2019t know any better. For the last dozen years, it had become the sound … <\/p>\n