I do this weird thing on Google Street View.

I do this weird thing on Google Street View where I go on crawling tours of the towns and cities in which I lived the worst times of my life. I re-enact walks I would take to miserable jobs, or to the corner store, or the mall, or the graveyard. I revisit old covert drinking spots. I pass, with a sense of smug relief, the recently shuttered juvenile prison to which my mother was convinced she'd send me.

Not to age myself, but I'd left for college by the time the earliest 360 shots of those places even appeared. Save for occasional train trips down for holidays, I was officially out of the picture.

In fact, no visit by Google's Cameramobile coincides with any point at which I might even plausibly be present. 

In March 2008, I have been away at school since mid-January. I am trying to figure out how to avoid going home for the summer.

In March 2009, I'm at school again. I've stopped answering calls from my dad's number, because they're actually covert calls from my mother.

In July 2013, I'm living in a new post-college town and working as a freelance writer. Also, I'm six months out from deciding I will never visit my parents down south again.

In March 2022 - Why are the intervals getting longer? - my parents have been dead over a year, and I've never made an appearance to settle anything.

It's a rancid nostalgia that keeps me coming back to these maps. There's no yearning for a return, just a need to remind myself that all that happened. That these places are real, and they were real, and I was there once and can recall those times with clarity when viewing a grainy photograph.

I was not photographed much as a child.

For example, the 2009 shots punch through me with sense memory. And why? Because it's so clearly an early morning in March, in the deep south, with no clouds around. The lens is hazed over with ambient liquid in the air. I can feel so freshly the foreboding tackiness of those mornings, the unpleasant play of scorching sunlight on a damp roadway chilled by the night. Those were mornings I'd wake up, sense the course of summer's ingress, and go, 'Aw, fuck me,' because the months of soaking from a combination of sweat and condensation from the air at all times had begun. I would start getting up earlier - home schooled often means no school at all, for those of you unaware - just to be out of that house before it got too smothering to walk the 3-5 miles to anyplace that felt safe.

I wore such holes in my high top sneakers walking ten miles every single day.

Maybe the amount of walking I did in those days informs my motivation somewhat. I've paced those streets so much, I did it for so long, that it doesn't seem entirely improbable that I'd find myself in the periphery vision of Google's custom-wrapped sedans. Like an insomnia hallucination. 

If I'm not at the mall, maybe I'm at the railyard drinking with other ghosts. Jagged captures of boys who are men who work on oil rigs now. 

I do feel very much a part of these places.

Which is a shame, because I've always hated them, and I'll never bring my body back there.

Current Listening: This Town by Trixie Mattel

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