What will burn away

Nov 28, 2008 18:25

     When I was a child, I took pride in being “from here”, the girl who had never moved houses or towns, the child immune to the Great Suburban Diaspora that seemed to blow the characters in my books about like paper dolls (funny how we take pride in things that really have nothing to do with us at all).  As I grew into the internal storm of adolescence, I came to associate home with smallness, willful ignorance, with fear of new things.  I lost my sense of being “from here”, wanted instead to be from Athens, the pixie-dusted collegiate haven 20 minutes east, so full of life and intellectual fervor it seemed to me at 16.  That’s what I told people in college, I’m from Georgia, but Athens! As if that meant something to the Boston CEOs’ daughters at Tulane.

So imagine my surprise to realize that Athens is really just a town, no different from others across America except that it holds my memories and friends and not someone else’s.  In a way, it is like realizing that everyone at camp is as afraid and alone as I am-a great equalizer.  I feel like I did at 17, wistful, anxious, ready to split for the next town with a train-stop and a vegetarian restaurant.  I want to know what comes next in my book, but I know that I cannot write anything sincere until I’ve really checked out my assumptions by throwing myself into the fire to see what will burn away and what will remain.
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