KUDZU KIDS
It’s summer and I’m bursting at the seams. There’s a lump in my throat the size of a peach pit I’ve felt since I was a chipped-tooth toddler.
Towns like this grow inside you, the kudzu wrapping up around your spine and along your ribs, tickling the skin, an itch you’ll never reach. We ain’t perfect. Paw’s truck smells like Marlboro Reds, but I won’t tell Mama. Every kid swears they met the devil himself out by the creek, “cross my heart, and hope to die”.
Remember when you showed me photos of where you’d been? When you told me of war all outside of here, of change, of the earth-shaking, breaking, and re-setting its bones. I tell you enough war is here. It’s in the silent prayers, in the backpacks filled with nonperishables, in the horse lying dead in the pasture, a bullet in its distended gut.
It smells like rain, and I tell you so, pulling the screen door shut, the loose screen flapping in the wind, waving to the salt air like some floozy. I pretend to feel love in this place, and I let you whisper about leaving together, of seeing the world, of changing together: two butterflies in one cocoon.
I remember home like a fever dream, where reality melts into something warmer, something liquid, molasses—sweet and slow as it sinks into my teeth.
There’s a moment in nowhere towns like mine where you realize that you aren’t real to others: when the summer season ends and all the businesses close up for the year, and the music stops echoing when you see that others enter and leave with ease, to new places—that you could do that too.
The first time I left, I fell in love with everything I touched. No family names to remember, no decade-old gossip to tread lightly over. I was fresh clay, ready for molding. To leave was to whisper to the world “I trust you, be gentle,” and let those invisible hands guide along your skin, feather-light, whispering promises of a future too fuzzy to name yet.
You’ll meet strangers who fill the gaps of family you miss. The world will glow so intensely for a bit, vibrating under your fingertips, that you will question whether or not this is your life rejecting you, but it’s quite the opposite: this is a secret message, a reminder that you have no handler to keep your feet from moving onward.
You will run from something you won’t name until you’re too old to run, a racehorse sent to stables after a bad season. You’ll feel it in the pull of an accent you just can’t wash out, in memories of an escape plan that only one could successfully plan. You’re somewhere out there, I know it, drifting still. I pray to the same sky I looked up at through my brother’s sunroof, asking if it’s my fault you never got over that drive-by town. I left with the morning trains headed north. You stood on the highway, the kudzu creeping out of your throat, reaching out for me.
Megan, 19, North Carolina - USA ✯
“I moved to Chicago and London as soon as I could, and a great lot of my work writing today has been impacted by that shift. I love to provide a "Southern Touch" to places days away from home and to explore the meaning of home.”