Southern Appalachia

Home is innocence - warm weather, tall grass, rolling landscapes on all sides. It is small hands reaching to hug you, and a mother's dry lips on your cheek. It's silent battles - decades of hurt feelings, nestled just below the surface and swallowing anger in the face of differences. It is apologizing after the blowout, picking up the shards of a relationship and trying not to cut your hands. Home is attempting to reconcile the inevitable, systematic sexism and racism in a region where communities are undereducated, underfed, and underfunded. It is hatred and love and pride and disappointment and fleeting and forever.

Home is 504 miles away now. Sometimes I yearn for it, sometimes it suffocates me.