You can never go home again.

Even when you do, you realise you don't belong here anymore.  It, as it once belonged to you, ceases its knowing.  It can't look you in the eyes. Its towering heights and individual galaxies seem tiny to you now.  Why does that dress shop look like it houses the Exact same prom dresses as it did in 1985?  Mix a few more asian-rican cultural misgivings into the mix, and the cart that once probably sold leotards now sells equally as tacky cell phone covers, and the slightest shift to one side, and here you are.

Walking through the diner parking lot, someone grabs your hand from the right, and you turn with a jerk, but its just the boy, wanting to hold your hand.  He says, slurred and with the beginnings of little skater boy, you "roooooooccccckkkk".  "And you're weird too".  You agree, and admit that this must be the reason you rock.  Push-pull, that was branded onto you a long time ago, not too far from this sloping city-town.  Somehow, farther up north, where you last belonged, in the "real" country, with dirt roads, and rivers you took boys to, no street lights, no malls, it felt like someplace else. This felt like a wind tunnel, of invisible snowy trees that no one saw or paid any mind to, whipping winds back and forth of each repeated, undeniable, unbeatable strip mall.  The residents of the rural places preferred going to the strip club off of route 32A, nestled under the mountains, considering it a fine place to spend a snowy evening, drink up and lose some dollars, smile at other people a bit-- they made more sense to you than these people.  These people were stuck in an infomercial, and you couldn't believe how much waste their lives seem to lay claim to, with some kind of consumerist fatigue, like they got all done up in the most ridiculous way possible while they waited - to be put blindly out of their misery.  You might wonder if it looked this way in 1985, before you all departed onto your the million dollar waterside adventures, and all the rest that followed you back here, to this day.

And then him in the back of your mind, still there after declaring he was locking himself into his hermit home, again and without the wherewithal to listen to your advice, as you gave it: "despite your head, you are a man. Stand up".  Maybe in a time before malls, but not before those same who came out for the show - little did they know of their very own self imposed group executions- before the water made men into pussies, and women into caricatures of themselves, prisoners to everything that hurt them again and again, maybe it was then, in some biblical-type-ridden desert town, or in the middle of a battlefield after defeat, or after love was thrown out with little care by you, perhaps his DNA remembered this and this is his way of getting back at you.  From deep inside his message box, morse code ramblings of a lonely young man, who was stuck forever between action and thought, feeling and the realization of it, and between cowardice and absolute understanding, he sits.  Waiting for a saviour, and you, despite your sacrifices, longing, days forever gone on the calendar, you - are not it.

So, round goes the highway, and back down past the street from both his and your homes, where he stays locked away, his dog beckoning at his feet, so needy and he cannot understand why, nearby there you find yourself inside that hundred year old bar, where you see the shadow of yourself, drunk and brand new, him leaning over you, enthralled and amazed that your liquid eyes still could make out the black and white photograph on the wall of the bar's infamous owner - on stage, with a noose around his neck.  Head cocked, in a shoddy suit.  Hair long, and wild.  "Waiting for Godot", you said.  "Yes", he said.  He's still trying to figure out your secrets, as he stares at the blank wall, alone.  Your shadow, holding his hand from the right side of him.

~ M. Lucia