To my hometown,
I never thought I would say this, but I miss you. Don’t get me wrong, I love where I am at right now, but some days I wake up and I miss you more than anything. I spent years thrilled by the idea of leaving you behind and getting as far away from you as possible. There was a time when I hated you so much, and thought you were just a spot on a map that was not worth spending the rest of my life in. I was set to leave, and I was more than ready to travel countless miles in any direction just to get away from you. You were just the place I had to spend my years of adolescence and when my time came, I could just slip away from you and never look back.
Even though I miss you, I’m glad to be away. I am excited for this opportunity to explore what’s beyond the twenty-mile radius that I spent my last eighteen years living in. Right now, you come up in conversation a lot. Meeting new people and making friends often leads to the question of where other people are coming from. When I say I come from a town called Mechanicsburg, nobody knows where I am talking about and even when I try to explain your location in greater detail, most times it still does not do too much to help. Compared to others, you may be small, and yeah sometimes there may not be a lot to do, but I’ve come to learn that is just a part of your small town charm.
I miss you, I miss the roads that I learned to drive on, the ice cream runs to Maggie’s with friends on summer nights hoping to get there before they closed, I miss the winding backroads and the fields that seemed to line every street coming home. I miss the comically named ‘Neato Burrito’ and the fact that on New Year’s Eve we drop a wrench. You can be kind of weird, but that’s okay, because you were home.
While you may not forever be my home, I thank you for forever being apart of who I am.