I’ve been spending the last few days at my parents’ house in Wichita, and as is often the case – I have been overwhelmed by my observations. As time passes, my hometown is a place I have an increasingly difficult time understanding. Probably because since I left I have continued to change, just as Wichita has. Because the feelings don’t really stop whether I’m walking about the interiors of my parents’ house, or I am aimlessly driving across the Wichita expanse. It all just seems so dead, and I can’t tell if its just dead to me, or dead in the first place. I think of Lawrence and force myself to consider that it too has places and people that belong to a culture that is submerged in suburban filth – just as Wichita is. But I don’t feel the same way about Lawrence. Is it because my life is there? My work, my friends, my passions? Wichita is the home of many a nostalgic memory, ranging from notions of family, upbringing, tradition, childhood, friendships and romances past. With all of this in mind, it seems my disdain for the city would not be so increasingly strong. Yet as I consider it, I don’t believe I hate the place any more than I used to. The society it cultivates is one I was learning to loathe way back in high school. I suppose the difference now is that I don’t wake up every morning in this city – asking myself how I’m gonna go about creating and being me today, as most high schoolers do. The landscape of my hometown was different then, not because we didn’t have a Bed Bath & Beyond yet, but because it was enveloped in the bright fantastic shades of a teenage boy’s insular and idyllic world. Though I’m hardly older, my world then was all about the present and the future, and the pastwas a word that I failed to understand. I still know where all my sacred spaces are, and even what I was thinking then – but to revisit them, or even the larger environment they are a part of – I feel like I’m putting on someone else’s clothes.