On Places.

I haven't lived in many places in life, really I haven't. In fact I'm probabably a little bit less traveled than most nineteen almost twenty something year old girls. The Bayou, Coden, Everett, Theodore, and now Montevallo. Only five towns I have lived in my life, two of them literally being right beside each other and the other only being only a biut away. I haven't had that much difference in cultureeither, considering four of the five places have been in Alabama. Although I can tell you this, south and north Alabama differ in vastly different ways that can never really be explained but only really experienced. And let me tell you this, every place I have ever lived holds a little bit of my heart.

The Bayou is full of my childhood memories, scattered in here and there all over town. And all the changed that came to the place I grw older, the physical presence of knowing there used to be a resuraunt there or that CVS was once an empty field. And everytime I go there something has been added or taken, a tiny little bit scooted over here and there. I am in the Bayou, eternally growing up. Everytime I see it I get a little older.

In Coden I was older and farther in, people would call them the back woods, changed weren't as evidents there,. But pieces of me are there too, in the park where Marina and I would sit for hours gazing at the ever moving water, it's waves sometimes peaked with white foam and other times the water so shallow we were tempted to step in. There was the cool green grass under my feet as I walked in my yard talking on the phone and the night where the streelights cast a smoky fog from all the fireworks going off to celebrate the new year.

Everett was different, a whole new world and eleven states away. My independence there was glorious, the moving about and having a job. I paid my own bills and made a food bugdet. Then there was the library, the lazy afternoons I spent in the massive place just lounging around and being filled with the wander of fiction. Early morning bus rides where it was only me and the driver were a thrill and the children I played witht he park were so much kinder than the ones I had known before. The most foreign part of all in Everett was getting to know people and people getting to know me, people who hadn't had some pervious knowledge or conception of me. I grew up in a small town, where you literally knew everyone. You weren't friends with them, you just knew them. People who sat beside me at graduation were the same chubby little kids who I had seen on the first day of kindegarten. There were people who I went all thirteen years of school with without ever speaking one word, but I still knew them. In Everett there was none of that.

In Theodore I was back in Alabama again, and it was such a hard unexplainable part of my life that I would never want to go back to it again. I felt useless and torn, my life is nothing to me without a purpose. And os I sought refuge in my work, it became my home and my coworkers became my best friends. Whenever I think of that time I think of the colored walls of Panera and singing and dancing between orders. All the times we shared while working and all the times we shared outside, with parties and beach days and working out together. That was where my heart was at in Theodore.

And now I'm in Montevallo and have been for six months. It's hard to say and I'm not sure how or why but I love this place more than nay other place I have been. It's just something I know, and I have to know. Sometimes I am walking aorund campus, and the sky in a brilliant blue and the grass is a spaklign dewy green, the sunlight it golden and streaming in between the trees in such a way that it feels like a hand is reaching out to me and taking my own and telling me it will be okay. This is where you are, this is where you belong. And even though I've lived here a shorter amount of times than any others I love it more. And I can't help it, my love for this town of Montevallo is pure and simple. My heart is in other places too, sometimes buried deeply and sometimes in view of everything. And I will never forget the places that hold pieces of me and my heart, but I feel as though in my current position of life Montevallo holds most of me. Most of my heart is here.

Fin.
-Keshia

Currently Reading The Little White Bird by J.M. Barry