After being back with my family in the small town that I grew up in, I struggle to feel to know where I belong in this world. I feel like an outsider with my family who have never lived outside of my little town of 900 people. I was encouraged, and I might say forced, to leave my small town after high school by my parents. I lived in London after graduating college and worked there for 6 months before moving back and going to the big city of Chicago, which is only 2 hours away. Now that I live in Denver, I feel even more disconnected to this small town way of life.

Yet I feel this pull to return. My brother keeps telling me to “life my life” but it still feels like it is a negative thing for some reason. My father is in poor health but he is neither choosing to help himself get or feel better nor does he have the ability to change the nerve damage that is done. He sits in a chair or his bed for his entire day and does not want to try to do anything that is difficult that may help or enhance his life. I want to be around him and my mother and even my brother who doesn’t seem interested in having a relationship with his sister or anyone really (that is for another day). I love the simplicity of small town living but I have no friends there anymore. I don’t know what I would talk about with most anyone. The places I’ve been and the things I’ve done are incomprehensible to most everyone who lives there.

Or maybe it is just that I don’t feel like Denver is my forever home either. I don’t know. I’m not sure how to exist in the world without heritage and roots. I love being part of a large extended family with lots of cousins. But most everyone lives in the same small town or nearby except my dad’s sister whom most people in town don’t even remember that he has. Will that be me? Yes, my face is up on the walls at school for various athletic endeavors and I used to hold a high jump record, but my brother has a shrine built for him there (by my father) for what he was able to accomplish in basketball. Why do I care? I’m not sure. But it is real and it is raw every time I go home.