Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone

I have learned that knowing where you're going means remembering where you've been. I'm not afraid of what lurks behind me, or ahead.

When you made plans, the saboteurs came out to play.

I'd seen it happen, how hard it was to get out. Every year, one or two kids would visit from college for a long October weekend and simply never leave. They came home, cocooned themselves in the familiar radius of the town limits, and never broke free again. Years later, you'd see them working in the kitchen at the pizza place, or sitting at the bar in the East Bank Tavern. Shoulders hunched, jaw set, skin slack. And in the waning light of their eyes, the barest sensation that once upon a time, they been somewhere else... or maybe it was only a dream.

She was dry, dry inside like a ten-thousand-year-old tomb, with the last of her life barely dampening the dirt underneath.

It was there that I wanted, out there somewhere, when I sat elbow-to-elbow with my giggling friends and let my thoughts swirl up and away from the three-mile radius of our small town lives. In my head, I careened out of town and across state lines, until the landscape became strange and unfamiliar. I wanted to see all of it. Everything. The vast expanses of the flat Midwest, miles of horizontal earth with the curving horizon at its end. Strange, stunted trees and driftwood skeletons on the lonely windswept beaches of the farthest coasts. Towering oaks hung thick with the gray lace of Spanish moss, looming like hovering parents over shaded southern dirt. The California sun, dipping and disappearing into the ocean, tipping the waves with orange light.

Once upon a time, the great big world outside Bridgeton had seemed like Xanadu - miles of golden road lined with smiling people, waiting to usher me through hundreds of open doors. There was nothing out there but bright light and possibilities. There were big dreams of other places, other people, even other boys. There had even, for two hours in April, been somebody else. He was a glimpse of the future, where I would live and breath and love far, far away from this place. A future where behind a closed door, on Saturday mornings, a boy I hadn't met yet would wrap an arm around my waist and exhale damp heat into the curve of my neck. Where we would keep our eyes closed, pull the covers closer, burrow down and deeper to escape the nine-o'clock sunshine, and the sound of heavy breath echoing along the rusted steel confines of a pickup truck would be nothing but a memory.

I shook my head. "it's not about living in a city." It wasn't. Back then, it wasn't just getting away. It was about not coming back. It wasn't just the size and sensibility of this place that made in unbearable, but its pull - the weird magnetism that could sap your ambition, clip your wings, leave you inert and fascinated and sinking ever deeper into the choking quicksand of small-town life.

She stared at him. His eyes were glazed, glassy, blazing with triumph behind his glasses, and as his lip curled in a sneer, she felt it happen. Her love for him—whatever shred of it was left—was gone. It had slunk away into the night. It would die out there, and she would not be sorry to leave it, at the side of the road, in a no-name town surrounded by nothing but blackness. Quietly, she said, “Knew what, exactly?” He licked his lips. “I knew you’d never turn into such a whore without a little help.” “Good-bye.” The word was out, and she was gone.

Murder in a small town is always more than a paragraph in the local paper. In a place so insulated, where lives are so small and gone about so quietly, violent death hangs in the air—tinting everything crimson, weaving itself into the shimmering heat that rises off the winding asphalt roads at noon. It oozes from taps and runs through the gas pumps. It sits at the dinner table, murmuring in urgent low tones under the clinking of glassware.

That girl, dead and gone, her spirit trapped forever just inside town limits—she'd come from someplace, was going somewhere. Until destiny had stepped into the road in front of her, stopped her forward motion, drawn a killing claw against the white, fluttering swell of her future. Whispering, 'Oh no, you don't.' When you made plans, the saboteurs came out to play.

I have learned that knowing where you’re going means remembering where you’ve been. I’m not afraid of what lurks behind me, or ahead. And while I make no promises, I have learned again, though tentatively, to make plans.

For many, the emotional trauma of a broken heart can manifest as real, physical pain.

There is no narrative now, no “And then,” only a disjointed series of images. A pile of photographs I’ve flipped through so many times that I don’t even need to look at them anymore to know what’s there, to see it, to cover my face with my hands and cry.

In a small town, unexplained tragedy can only go so long before it grows teeth, sprouts sharp claws, and turns, snarling, on its own self. Before fragments of gossip become rumors, and the rumors become suspicions. Before neighbors start eyeing each other with the mistrustful narrowness of oft-kicked dogs. Inside the safe shelter of their homes, husbands and wives draw the blinds tight and turn to each other, worrying at small bits of information and wondering who, who among their shrinking circle of trusted friends, might still know something he isn’t telling.

An anonymous death in a small town, that’s a different thing. It makes people uneasy. They stop gossiping, talk only with trusted friends, or—realizing that nobody can truly be trusted—they don’t talk at all. Instead of settling in the streets or running through the municipal sewer system, murder moves inside. It becomes internalized. It seeps around the corners of locked front doors. It creeps into people’s bedrooms. It runs in their veins.

She had been derailed, delayed, detained forever at the side of the road in a town surrounded by nothingness.

Just because it's not hard science, just because it doesn't lead to a high-paying job at a hedge fund after college, doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing.

Our knowledge has no memory. We have always lived here; what we know has always been.

There was not supposed to be blood on the road. That girl, dead and gone, her spirit trapped forever just inside town limits-- she'd come from someplace, was going somewhere. Until destiny had stepped into the road in front of her, stopped her forward motion, drawn a killing claw across the white, fluttering swell of her future. Whispering, "Oh no, you don't." When you made plans, the saboteurs came out to play.

One girl lost forever to this stagnant place was enough.

Stop and think as you pass by, she hissed. As you are now, so once was I.