where are the good things?

in commemoration: long live the upstate kids and the woman who protected their magic

written while visiting home: switch that to (the place I grew up), for a celebration of life of a mother-figure taken too soon. a homage, a reminiscing, a placeholder. commemorating the lives that have happened and passed here, how even in the unjust and the afflicted, the good things still prevail.

…for Ida

In the place where I was born, there is a field with a cross that sits against the horizon. There is a stone church where I went to preschool that has since closed, where my first boyfriend and I would hop the fence late at night and swing on the playground swings, alcohol falling from our lips. There are fields and endless back country roads that swallow you whole with each turn. The church we all attended as kids was a set expectation- that none of us ever saw as anything more than a social hour- or the place we gathered when friends were lost to car accidents or drug overdoses, to say our goodbyes. There is an undertone of God here, in this small upstate town, but it feels inaccessible, as if buried beneath the farmland crop killed too soon by the first frost. You begin to notice the lifelessness more than you notice most things. 

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