V. M. Kornfeld

Carolina

V. M. Kornfeld

This is the ragged culmination of it all. Every blood-soaked ripped jean knee. Every porch and alley, thick air, bitter exhalation.

There were years when you hated her. The rolling mountains, the haze of far away brushfires. She built you, and she broke you, and you refused to acknowledge either one.

Now the memory makes you sick. A roiling sick that both tethers you far away and painfully up close. You’ll never leave that city where you’re from, it tells you. Not even when you die. You’ll be buried with her.

It will be a slightly too familiar hand between your shoulder blades till then. Despite its discomfort, you’ll return to it. It is the abuser that leaves you swimming in both fear and an emptiness only their script can fill.

That isn’t to say it was all bad. There was much of substance, and of love. Those who would hold you, and give you bad haircuts on mothfilled back porches.

You want to summarize it. But it’s too complicated for that. There’s no simple answer to her melancholy.

122

And this is why the culmination must be ragged. Ragged like the edges where you tore away the unwanted with your teeth. There will never be home the way there once was, and it shows on you.

One might pity call it- wanderlust. But you know it’s just an inability to stand still. You’re still the child that jumped in every puddle. She’ll leave you with that. She’ll leave you your frog rain boots. She’ll leave you your love for sidewalk leaves. She’ll leave you with a comfort only growing up loved could bring.

All this and in the end, it must be ragged. You never liked the straight and narrow after all. So maybe ragged suits you.

123