On Belonging
Orginally published in Else Journal, Issue 02, “Neighbourhood.”
“They say the loneliest sound in the world is the first huckleberry hitting the bottom of the pail in springtime.”
My father had already said it once, and he said it again, exactly the same way, as though he had never said it at all.
“They say the loneliest sound in the world is the first huckleberry hitting the bottom of the pail in springtime.”
He was sitting at his mother’s dining table in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the town in which he grew up. It was just after Christmas, but even then, in the technical dead of winter, the mist hung limp and warm over the trees outside. My family travels back to Mississippi twice a year or so; on this particular trip I found myself reading Faulkner, which caused the experience to resonate with a familiar otherworldliness, as though I were living the text itself. At the moment I was sure that it was Faulkner’s description of Mississippi that made me remember something about myself, or perhaps about my past, something long forgotten that I have been trying to grasp onto that I can never quite understand. But perhaps it was only the sheer density of the humid air, the way the bottoms of my bare feet in the morning always feel slightly damp on the hardwood floors of my grandmother’s house that recalls swimming through a memory not quite my own. The roads were wet with mud, and when we took my uncle’s SUV out to the old eroded canyon we might as well have been characters in As I Lay Dying, riding on to Jefferson. Past churches and trailers and forests of pine; past railroads and one-intersection towns; past fields and woodsheds and run-down cars; and past, and past, and past, forever.
And it is, in a sense, my inherited past: one generation shy of a Mississippi upbringing, born and raised farther north in Virginia, I have always experienced the American South through the lens of nostalgia, that bittersweet confusion of space and time—space and time, which I have long understood to be so interconnected, so tethered to any semblance of identity. I am painfully aware that the sentimentality I feel for the South is but a symptom of the particular otherness I harbor toward that region of the United States; were it more than a story in my familial past, it would undoubtedly take on the dull staleness of normality. I would see the strip malls and shotguns in my mind’s eye right along with the red clay and the wisteria. But rarely has the South been more than a story, told with the enchanting timbre of legend from the time I was a child, and so it shimmers with storybook magic in my mind: that from which I came. It is with this sense of historical significance that I have, at my core, a question of geographical identity I have never quite been able to answer. It might be naive or simplistic or an excuse for failing to create an identity of my own, but it has nonetheless had a very real impact on my life, on the way I see the world. For as long as I can remember, the grass has been greener. If not the South, I am always romanticizing some place, convinced that in my current state—in both senses of the word—I am not whole. There has always been a part of me that was sure I belonged somewhere else; I’ve just never been able to figure out quite where.
For a while now I’ve been sleeping in an apartment in Brooklyn, but I don’t always feel as though I live there. One night, when my roommates are late coming home and I have forgotten my keys, I walk to a park bench nearby as the early March air whispers a cold rain. The air in New York never feels so breathable as when it is raining. I stare down at the hexagonal patterned concrete, already freckled with water. I sit there with my headphones in, listening to the same Gillian Welch song over and over and over again as my hands go numb.
Way down in Dixie, oh do they miss me, down along the Dixie Line?
For a long time, I thought that maybe I belonged in Nashville, Tennessee. I could say why but it wouldn’t make a difference. I still have that thought every now and then—that I would be happier living somewhere other than New York, somewhere closer to nature, somewhere warmer or less anxiety-provoking. Somewhere where I feel free. Sometimes I’m inclined to pack up and drive south until I hit Tennessee. More often I am too scared, too attached to the idea of living in New York, too paralyzed by the thought of giving up some stray opportunity still lingering beneath the concrete. What if I am leaving behind a future? What dormant success or love or excitement lies waiting to come alive in the streets I would so readily abandon?
Can’t you hear those drivers wail, can’t you see those bright rails shine?
I know it’s a fear that is not unique to my mind. Lately it seems that we are all caught in the throes of potentiality, me and everybody else I know—in New York, or Nashville, or California, or anywhere. Perhaps it’s a symptom of age, or climate, (or, science forgiving, the stars)—or maybe I simply do not know enough people—but even before the globe fell to pandemic-induced chaos, it felt as though we had all only just realized that we were alive. It felt as though, collectively, we were on the verge of finding out that the daily routines we inhabit are what will amount to remembered lifetimes, that there are exponential and infinite possibilities of things we might be doing or accomplishing or knowing or seeking. If I were just— if we were just— if we could—
We can’t. We should know that by now. We will do what we will do.
Gonna catch that fireball man, leave the north land far behind.
But I cannot grasp this. I am simply unable to. I cannot reconcile myself with potentiality, I cannot fathom the possibilities and the effort and the loss.
And this, the fear of loss, is what stops me in my tracks. As I recently learned in Jonathan Safran Foer’s newest book about climate change, We Are The Weather, the word “crisis” comes from the Greek krisis, which means “decision.” Everything you do is a decision, and every decision involves loss; this is inevitable. Every decision contains a myriad of alternative decisions not made, an infinity of things you did not choose. In economics, this is called “opportunity cost.” In Greek, this is called “crisis.”
They’ve pulled up the tracks now, I can’t go back now, can’t hardly keep from cryin’.
I wrote earlier that I’ve been sleeping in Brooklyn, but for the moment that is no longer true. Two weeks ago the infamous coronavirus made its way to New York City, and I now find myself in my childhood home, quarantined at my parents’ house in Virginia. We’ve been eating meals as a family, for the most part, the way we used to when we all lived here together last, the way we do on trips to Mississippi. The other night over dinner someone made a comment that it felt as though, in this strange period of homebound perpetuity, nothing really mattered. And I agreed, likening it to the week between Christmas and New Years, that timeless oblivion when I occasionally change out of my pajamas but cannot entirely fathom why.
Truth be told, I lied, or maybe repeated something I had seen once on the Internet. The week between Christmas and New Years is not what this sudden breach in time reminded me of. What it really reminds me of is too precious, too colored with grief, too abstract to mutter aloud, would have been too much to explain at the dinner table anyway. What it really reminds me of is this:
It was New York in November and it was on my mind, on your mind, on all of our minds, this potentiality. Always potential. Always the energy, before it is kinetic. And suddenly, as if we had dwelled for so long on this daunting prospect of the present becoming the future that the heavens were suddenly filled with its essence, there it was—the long-awaited visual, the cosmic prompt to the question of earthly purposelessness. You wake up and it’s 10am, but somehow the febrile yellow glow being reflected off the clouds makes it look as though the sun were setting on that particular morning in Brooklyn. And while in the moment it strikes you with the sadness of a premature ending, you find that for the rest of the day you feel surprisingly free. For the remainder of that strangely illuminated rotation of the earth, you feel as though nothing you do has any consequence. This, the free pass, the exception; that longed-for moment when everything, even your own thoughts, becomes devoid of meaning, simply because the sun had already set when the day was just beginning. This—this is limbo, these are somnolent hours, these are the moments of icy luminescence before that final setting of the sun, the one that is more than a trick of the light.
Despite everything—despite my better judgment—this is when it matters.
As the days pass by in quarantine, the time has been staring back at me—not the clock but the time—mocking my every attachment to identity, to latitude and longitude, to the past, to the aesthetic tied to the location of the bedroom I sleep in that in turn reflects back some idea of myself. I am thinking, perhaps, that we must let go of any preconceived notion of belonging. And thus of displacement. And thus of loss, and of confusion, and of failure. Before we belong somewhere, and maybe even after, we are but singular beings tracing our own destinies through the unknown. The trees outside are blooming. It is only the beginning.
Oh, do they miss me?
that reverberant echo of solitude
Way down in Dixie
the sound of a single huckleberry
Down along the Dixie Line
hitting the bottom of the pail in springtime.