Written by Bri Lamere. Image by Ananya Panchal.
I can’t pinpoint exactly what repels me about my Minnesota hometown after spending more than a week there. College students who move a thousand miles from home usually say we left for bigger and better opportunities. But deep down, maybe we just wanted to get away from our high school peers, prodding families, and buildings that are haunted with memories of the past.
It isn’t a glamorous view out the airplane window: huge brown fields instead of coastal waterways to the ocean, but it’s how I know I’m home. It must be a mile in between neighbors houses. It didn’t take much to pack up my oversized hard-shell suitcase and leave for the palm trees and a jack-less winter. I heard about an art school in a mid-size city in Georgia a few years ago, and the rest is history.
The mall, bowling alley, and the woods are the places to go out with friends in Minnesota. The drive to Chicago, the closest major city, is seven hours at best. Life has a lull compared to the East Coast. It’s busy in Savannah at times, but it’s perfect for those of us who stay.
The chaos I’ve come to love in my new city consists of small square blocks with puzzles of bustling fast-food restaurants and Dollar Generals. There are always cars to keep me company at four o’clock in the morning on the road to the airport in Savannah.
Back home, that drive is an hour of deserted freeway. Cement barriers change to fields of patchy grass with deserted strip malls for lease on the far side. It makes the yellow light of my home on a snowy night magnetic. I fight to find a similar feeling of an invitation home in Savannah.
Dread creeps up in public in my hometown, out of fear of being recognized. For such a spread-out region of the country, the public schools can get huge. Mine had 3,000 students pulled from multiple cities. While there were too many of us to know everyone’s business, it was easy to make enemies. When I go back sometimes we narrow our eyes, and I remember they’re from my past.
Community is vital in the cold, northern winters, but it isn’t always accessible. People stay inside to bond, making everywhere else feel lonely. Isolation continues year-round with cliques of friends, timid to interact with other groups, outside in the few warm months of the year.
It’s refreshing to be free of the drama in Savannah, although I do miss how good it felt to lock eyes with someone I haven’t seen in years–a greeting hug reminding me of my old community, and how we used to know each other. Inclusion is at arms’ length in the South. All it takes is someone seated alone on a bench for a stranger to strike up a conversation.
It’s easy to fall in love with the idea of a city, but to see myself living there is another story. Moving 1,112 miles from my hometown taught me it’s possible to build a community anywhere.
