Gas stations where I’d fill up for 99 cents a gallon on our endless slow country drives, soundtracked by Dashboard Confessional and Alanis Morissette
Playgrounds and parks where I’d go to make out and swap secrets and talk for hours with boys
The strip club on the highway, which we’d pass sometimes on the bus coming or going for baseball or football games and the boys would all pound on the windows and holler (I was a manager)
The historic theater where I danced with enthusiastic mediocrity in a recital every June for over a decade
The 2 year college where I spent 1 troublesome year licking my wounds over not getting into the only 4 year college I cared about
The apartment I lived in that 1 troublesome year, less than a mile from the house I grew up in, where I began a subscription to Newsweek and Us Weekly just to get some real mail, where we drank apple cider out of champagne glasses just because, and where the rent was $600
The nail salon where I got my first and last French tip manicure, to be a bridesmaid at the shotgun wedding of a church friend
My old dentist’s office with the most gorgeous view of the bluffs
The funeral home that not too many years ago held the visitation for my first love’s sister, who taught me how to throw up my meals but also how to give fewer fucks
The cemetery where literally no one I know is buried but for which my old church is named
That church that I was born into, where I was baptized at 11, and stopped attending at 16, and left for good at 22 without an ounce of regret
The house I grew up in, which looks exactly the same now but for a different, blander color paint on the garage doors and an incongruous and lonesome white wicker rocking chair on the icy basement patio
Our old neighbors, whose kid in my grade was inexplicably more popular than me, and who hosted a party in middle school to which I wasn’t invited but my two best friends were and to which I expected them to decline attendance in solidarity with me, but they did not
The high school, of course the high school, where I had my first real kiss and failed algebra and hung out by my locker every morning with my friends and scored rather averagely on the ACT
The Dairy Queen that is now a Mexican restaurant; the K-Mart that became a Sears that became nothing at all for a long time and then finally became a U-Haul; the Wal-Mart that became a Slumberland when the Wal-Mart Supercenter opened up a couple miles south; the liquor store where I once used my fake ID that became a Burger King that became a Kwik Trip
The house of the kid I babysat one summer, who grew up to be a juvenile delinquent and eventually an actual criminal (albeit guilty mainly of drug-related offenses, but it can’t have helped that I let him graffiti the driveway one boring Tuesday) (and by “let” I mean I was busy reading or something and it just kinda happened)
*****
I’ve got nothing more profound to say than I just have a lot of memories here, and I’m very fortunate that the vast majority of them are good, or at least aren’t awful, and that’s something a lot of people can’t say. Sorry for the emo nostalgia.
I’ll write the Nagappala Book Awards tomorrow or Monday. Don’t think I forgot.
Sconnie Molly 