Back Home, Back Down South
On lightning bugs, nostalgia, and going home
I’m back home, back down south and it’s like I’m thirteen again. American flags fly all around us and we sit on bright orange Adirondack chairs and the crickets and the bullfrogs call out from the water. And down by the dock, the lightning bugs dance all around us in a way they’ve only ever done in my memory.
I’m back home, back down south and it’s the 4th of July and it feels so strange to be back in the States and to be celebrating a country that has done so much wrong. I’m not wearing red, white or blue, to make a statement, but I’ve inherited many things from my mother and one of them is a dedication to blissful ignorance at times like these so I try my hardest to see the good but can only think of the bad.
And we are all back together under one roof, my family and me, and my dad still has no patience but he means well, as we swore he always did, he just shows his love in a way only he can understand. And the southern summer sun is so damn hot and I’ve forgotten how suffocating it can feel as the minnows swim under my feet.
I can’t help but make it all about me and I think about how I feel like a woman in a romcom who has been gone for too long and has come home to find that everything has changed. But my mom is cutting watermelon in the kitchen just like she’s always done and yet there are silver strands in her hair now and I think about how I never really did want to leave home even though I dreamt of it all the time and I really was happy there.
And I’m here, back down south, thinking about how there is a sense of this kind of Americana summer you can’t get anywhere else and it feels very Lana Del Rey if she were raised in Carolina. And it’s something I’ve been embarrassed of for so long but never was able to outrun so I’ve learned instead, to lean in. And there’s a song playing now that I burned on a cd back in the summer of ‘16 and it makes me so nostalgic to listen to that it reminds me why it’s sat, untouched, in my ‘06 Saturn ever since.
I’m back home, back down south, and it’s all Kenny Chesney and diner breakfasts, American flags and fireworks along the water. It’s gas station air conditioning and my mom’s OPI toes and her pool coverup all pink and orange and dad watering the grass even though there’ll be rain. It’s my sister who hasn’t changed and I hope she never will because she’s the only one who ever really knew how to make me laugh like that.
And summers down here are marked by the simple things like smores on the fire and sparklers and our family dog that is still holding on and freedom as if we’ve ever really lived without it. They are marked by the smell of hot rain on concrete and tan lines that’ll stay until Halloween and wondering who it is that you’ll become even though you’re already well on your way to becoming. And you wonder if maybe it’s too late to wonder after all.
And at night, way down south, I fall into bed and I’m so tired from the sun that I think about how strange it is that we are all sleeping in one house again and how nice it is that I can hear my brother sleeping down the hall. For a moment I feel so at peace and I let myself feel thirteen again, like I’m sleeping in the same room with my little sister and posters on the walls of boyband stars I was so embarrassed to admit I still loved so much.
And back home, back down south I think about my apartment back in New York and I feel like maybe there’s another universe where I never left and I was happy here, too. And I feel like if past and present versions of myself were to meet they wouldn’t even recognize each other and that makes me worried but for now it’s all vivid sunsets and heartbreak and hope and all of the in-betweens and I sit between my parents in the morning drinking coffee like nothing has changed and nothing ever will.
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Oh how I miss them♥️
This piece was beautiful! I grew up in South Carolina but moved to New York seven years ago and you perfectly worded the thoughts I have while visiting home. I spent hours dreaming of leaving my hometown and living in New York, and now I sometimes find myself missing the town I once wanted to escape.