When Naze wrote her piece, I thought about what I have done to change so that my kids’ lives (re: Generation F) might be better. At its most essential, it started with leaving where I’m from.
I’m from a small town in rust-belt Ohio. I won’t bother telling you its name because you have never heard of it. I have never met a person in the larger world who has.
But if you are interested in visiting, it can be found by following a county road lined with cornfields and big white grain silos slowly oxidizing from the inside out. Once, a devout woman said she saw Jesus in one of the tankard’s rust stains, and for days cars lined up along the shoulder to catch a glimpse, their passengers peering and nodding at the blood-colored blotches like they knew something blessed had occurred there. Follow the signs advertising once-prosperous, long-shuttered glass factories and sparkplug plants. You’ll know you’ve arrived when you smell the soybeans cooking hot and earthy like boiling beer.
This town sits amid a triangle of train tracks over which slow-moving, graffiti-tagged boxcars whistle at all hours, a lullaby and an alarm clock. Since the railroad ties were laid, kids who live along them have put pennies on the smoldering silver rails, waiting for the CSX line to flatten them into smooth copper ovals. Ghost stories about headless conductors and ladies in white dresses lingering over country crossings have always been recited, eerie warnings to always look both ways.
For decades, nothing has changed. People have left and died, industry has left and died. And yet nothing has changed.
There is a part of my mind imprinted with the geography of this town—its decaying neighborhoods and abandoned grain elevators. It’s the part that reminds me of where I’m from, and yet exists apart from it, so that I might not stay the same—so that I might shift and change and change and change.