on getting the hell outta dodge

every now and then, it becomes an absolute necessity for me to get the fuck out of burlington. last spring, one of my many escapades led me to tiny westminster, a town of about 3,000 people almost two hours from the place i call home. i stayed in an old, old farmhouse belonging to my best friend rome's mother, where i found a brief reprieve from the constant bustle and stimulation of the city. the moment i stepped out of my best friend's car into the muddy driveway, i felt like a weight had been lifted from my head and shoulders. i turned to face the state highway we'd just pulled off of, and heard a sound i hadn't realized i was desperate to hear- silence.

it was broken only by the sound of rome's footsteps plodding through the mud up to the porch. i followed, almost unsettled by the sudden calm, so different from the constant happening that had surrounded me for months. i'm from a town even smaller than westminster, and that silence, that nothingness, is precious in its rarity. 

burlington leaves me wired and on edge much of the time. i'm still not used to the constant stimulation, but i rarely notice the tension i carry here until i go elsewhere, back to quiet small towns like the one i grew up in. sometimes it feels like burlington is slowly smothering me, but in those uneventful small towns, i can breathe again. then, when i go back, i take a big breath and hold it for as long as i can before i have to go south to come up for air again.

last night, on a whim, i went on another one of my famous side quests, one of my first without rome's companionship. burlington simply became too much. i was overcome by an almost physical feeling of being pulled towards a town i once called home, a life i would've still been living under different circumstances. i had no plans that night, no reason to resist that feeling that i needed to be elsewhere.

so i drove through the night back to my beloved castleton. 

i had a point i needed to prove to myself, and something i'd wanted to do for a long time but was only now able to push through my reservations around.

i went back to my other home. for a matter of hours, i lived the life i might have lived if i hadn't transferred, a world away from the one i've built over the past two years. 

i parked my car in the lot by the psych building where i used to hang out with my friends zoe, alaana, and solace before class. i played pool with a stranger named josh in the campus center pool room, like i used to do between classes. i did that so much that i learned how one of the tables slanted, my secret for appearing to be good at pool. even two years later, they hadn't fixed the slant. and i knew for a fact that at least one person in student government was well aware of that- i still occasionally bask in the glow of kicking his ass at pool on that table and knocking him down several much-needed pegs.

i won the game, went upstairs to the little retail store for dinner, and found that they'd brought back the meal i would always get if i was working a technical services gig in the campus center. i wandered around upstairs, where i used to hang out with friends i haven't spoken to in far too long. through the massive wooden doors behind me was the conference room where i first met rome, when we'd been tasked with providing technical support for a mind-numbingly boring faculty conference. i wandered aimlessly around the campus for a while, hoping i might see some familiar faces, before returning to my car. by now, it had just started to snow.

i drove out to green dump, a pulloff out alongside nearby lake bomoseen. the lake is a popular spot for castleton students in the warmer months. in a different world, i probably would've come out here with a different group of friends to get drunk by the shore or just sit and enjoy the view. now, i brought out my guitar and played in the blissful pitch-black solitude of my car until the windows fogged and froze and i could no longer see the glow of the ice-fishing shanty out on the frozen surface of the lake. 

i laid out blankets and had every intention of sleeping by the shore there. but my anxiety got the better of me with every car that passed. i was certain one of them would be a cop pulling in to shoo me out. finally i abandoned that spot and drove through falling snow and unplowed, winding roads along the lake back to the center of town. briefly, i considered taking rome up on their offer to come stay at their place, but i realized quickly that the hour's drive to westminster in this weather would be suicide. so instead i laid out blankets on the floor of my car in the parking lot behind the deli. i remembered fondly all the times i'd go there with my coworkers before an evening work call, or just when i'd had a long day of classes and needed a treat. so many memories of a different life surrounded me. the loading dock where i'd hang out with the upperclassmen while they smoked away a particularly trying day at work. the convenience store next door where i could almost always find a classmate or friend of a friend working the register. the retro diner across the silent street, where i'd often gone for dinner with friends i'd lost touch with. 

for a while, i laid there curled and twisted to fit in the space between the second and third rows of seats, reliving memories years in the past. the nostalgia came with grief, with wondering how my life might have been different had i stayed, wondering what i'd turned my back on in finding the community in burlington that i've since grown to love.

would i have gone through on my initial plan to get an apartment with my friends samantha and armani? would i have been happier surrounded by the people of castleton's theatre program? would i have stayed in the closet, knowing that castleton is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone's business, including people from my high school who i was perfectly fine with keeping in the dark about my queerness.

perhaps there's a touch of masochism in my desire to revisit a life i can never return to in full. to just sit with this yearning to know what would've happened to me if i'd stayed in castleton. for a year, i put down roots and started to cement my place there, and then, in a matter of days, i completely changed course, uprooted, and had to go through the same damn thing again in a different place, this time still grieving what i'd left in castleton and forever subconsciously comparing this new existence to my old one. i had a yardstick to measure my experience here against that most of my classmates didn't- i'd already been through all the awkwardness and finding-your-place shit of my freshman year once, and just when i'd gotten settled, i'd had to go through it a second time, while the pain of leaving was still fresh. i wish i had some way of knowing how my life would've turned out if i had stayed behind. the desire to return no longer outweighs my attachment to what i've built for myself in burlington, but it's always in the back of my mind. i no longer want to leave burlington for castleton- and couldn't if i wanted to- but i'd give just about anything to know how things would've been different if i'd stayed.

and now i had nothing but time and solitude to sit with those thoughts.

it was there that i stayed for the night, uncomfortable and occasionally cold and sleeping poorly. it came in fits and bursts, stretches of an hour or two at the longest, interrupted by a sudden draft or an ache in my back or hip that i could no longer ignore. but even in the midst of my discomfort and the anxiety firmly nestled in my gut, i'd done what i set out to do- spend a night by myself, traveling where i pleased and sleeping in my car alone. i'd been wanting to do a solo car camping trip for ages, and even if this wasn't achievement of that goal so much as a stepping-stone on the path towards it, it was also desperately needed. i'd needed a reminder of my own independence, refreshing the knowledge that i could set my own destinations and my own backup plans and find my own way back home.

as sore and tired as i was when i woke up at four the next morning, i also felt deeply certain of myself, in a way that i hadn't when i'd blown in with the snow the night before. 

now my task was getting back to my dorm before my mother woke up, in case she checked my location and saw that i was an hour and a half away from home, with no explanation that wouldn't involve an hour of backstory. i assessed my options- the shorter route up through rural farm country to middlebury, where i could then follow route seven home, or the longer but better-traveled route four past castleton, all the way to rutland, where i could then cruise home north on seven. i determined that routes four and seven were major arteries and therefore far more likely to be plowed than the back roads i'd taken coming into town, and took that route, which proved to be correct. i drove an hour and a half home on silent stretched of highway as the sun rose, through the same towns that i'd travelled through for as long as i could remember, finally pulling into the last parking spot outside my building at about six this morning. 

i arrived far more at peace than i was when i left. somehow, when i trudged in the doors of my dorm after a night in the snow and emptiness of a town i'd nearly called home, i felt far better off than i did when i left the night before.