I’m back. All of my clocks are an hour off. I ate a McRib for dinner in the Cincinnati airport, which is actually in Kentucky. I’m mostly unpacked, but I feel like I need to do some mass cleaning in the apartment, except I don’t feel up to it right now.
Indiana was a good getaway. I got to see both of the nephews and all of the other immediate family, and even anti-kid-me has to say that eight-month-old Wesley is pretty damn cute. I borrowed my mom’s car for most of the trip, and drove around all of my old haunts, noticing both the changes and the fact that a lot of stuff is pretty close to the same fifteen years later. It’s weird for me to drive, because all of the routes and trips are so burned into my brain, I just think “I’m going to University Park Mall” and without realizing it, I drive the entire journey from memory.
It’s strange for me to be back. In some sense, it’s sad, to think back to the time I was there, and know that everyone is now gone, changed, moved on and into their own families and not what I remember from high school. It’s not that I want to re-live that time, it’s just it would be nice to run into some people from back then, talk about it, see it again, and the only person that I still know in town is Ray, and he never wants to leave his apartment, aside from going on his weekly comic book run. On the other hand, I find Elkhart to be infinitely more habitable now that I have lived in New York. Everyone I know has a gigantic house with room after room of storage and furniture, usually purchased for the cost of a new car here. I realize I would go batshit insane after living in Elkhart for more than a week, but I really wish I could have a place like that, a car in the garage, a Super Target down the road.
But NO, I do not want to move back to Elkhart.
Okay, I need to crack open the photos I took and get them uploaded.