It had been seven years since he had last seen her. Her, the mythical ‘one who got away’. The reason he was afraid to talk to girls. It had been seven years since he saw her making out with somebody at his going away party. Seven years since he felt his heart break like it never had before, a sort of feeling that doesn’t wash away no matter how many beers or whiskeys you pour into your mouth. No matter how many girls you grow crushes on and no matter how much time passes, you still have this burn deep within yourself. Tanner felt this every night. 

Here he was, however, back to his roots. Back to where all the pain started all that time ago. It’s funny how places both stay the same and completely change after an extended period of being away. Buildings stay where they are but new businesses move in. What used to be farmland has become a Walmart or a Target. Or a Starbucks. Even the most rural of settings in America are transforming into new urban meccas, slowly but surely. Heartland, USA will become a district in the Megapolis of the United States, given enough time.

A hundred years, a thousand years, a millennium. If America sticks around for a long enough time-line, corporations will buy out all the prairies and farmlands and swamps and forests and build skyscrapers and shopping malls. Destroying one type of beautiful for another, completely different type. This is the first thing Tanner thinks as he stumbles off of the Greyhound he rode nine-hundred miles in on. The small town in southern, rural USA has grown. Where a sled hill used to be, a shopping center and a Taco Bell/Pizza Hut/KFC now stand proud. Where a small, dusty two lane road used to lie a brand new, sparkling black four lane highway now rests, like a king on a throne.

A mixture of classic Ford pickups and brand new Nissan compact cars flood the new shopping center and Tanner takes a deep breath. A panic breath. Anxieties of two completely different things hit him: he has to face her again and he doesn’t recognize his old home. He fears that in five years, he’ll be in a completely new land.

“Tanner?” A voice echoes deep in his head as he shivers. A familiar voice. A distant and unrecognizable voice at the same time. “Wow, you’ve changed.”

Turning around and exhaling a deep, visible, frosty breath, Tanner’s lip muscles stretch across his face. He didn’t think he’d be happy to see Kyleigh, but here he was smiling. “Yeah, I’ve lost a bit of weight. I almost didn’t even recognize your voice.”

“Well, seven years does things to a girl’s throat.” As she said this, she dipped her hands into her denim pockets and rocked back and forth on her black heels.

The two of them now sat in a booth at a local diner, established 1940. The kind of diner that refused to refinish and refurbish their furniture, equipment and building. The kind of shittiness that’s comforting. The kind of down home feel, the kind that you know’s going to stay around as long as it can. A waitress comes over (an older lady, not the young kind you see represented in books and television and movies) and offers the two of them some coffee and carrot cake. Tanner and Kyleigh both nod their heads and Kyleigh is ripping her straw wrapper up and placing the bits and pieces of paper on her water cup that’s covered in condensation.

“I never thought I’d see you again,” Kyleigh says, looking up from her mosaic of paper on her red plastic cup of a canvas. “You know, after I did that to you.”

“Well, I never planned on coming back. Saw myself as better than you and this place, deserving more. But, I don’t know.” Tanner was looking everywhere aside from Kyleigh’s eyes. A nervous sweat had taken his palms, “it’s just, that really fucked me up, Kyleigh. That. You. This place. I don’t know. I’m sorry, I guess. Not really though. Look…”

The waitress (you know, the one that was slightly round and overly friendly, kind of grandmotherly) placed the stained and chipped coffee cups down on the table and tossed a few tiny cups of creamer in the center of the table. 

“Your cakes’ll be right out.” She hobbled away, slowly.

“God this place is the only place that refuses to change.” Tanner lightly blew on his coffee, he’d grown to drink it black over the years which, unfortunately, meant it took longer to cool down to drinkable temperatures. “I like that. A sense of consistency in a world full of inconsistency.”

MORE MAYBE TO COME, THIS STARBUCKS IS CLOSING.

  1. brenttharshman posted this