A trip up memory lane... Hwy 21, that is

There was this feeling inside my chest that reverberated in every direction such that I felt it in my stomach, in my shoulders, in my throat. But I felt it most sharply in my heart, which is directly linked to my brain with a pit stop at my tear ducts.

I started feeling it a couple months ago when I received my friend’s 50th birthday invitation and knew right in that moment that not finding a way to make it to this event was really not an option. Still, with all the business of life between then and the date of the party, I was able to set it aside and not deal with the emotional part of it. I was elated about the reason I was traveling back to this town… I was going to see people that have special meaning to me, that I feel love me to my very core despite my many flaws and despite the amount of time that passes between our visits. These people were in my life during some of the very best moments in my life, during some of the very worst moments of my life, and also during many learning moments that I experienced, as my heart was ripped out, shredded, put back in, bandaged, still damaged, trying to heal… when I think about some of these people, I don’t just see someone I know and love, I see the ribbon of my life history with the shimmer of the good times, the loops of my ups and downs, and the flat, grounding moments all tied together. I see people that were part of the pain I experienced and lived through, became stronger because of - but also a bit jaded, a bit hardened, a bit cynical… all things I had to work through so that I could experience true joy again, true color again, true love again and… to trust again.  In a word, it was heavy. Especially because not only did I have both the best and worst experiences in my life here, but I also gained and lost friends here, as well, and learn a lot about what true friendship feels like and doesn’t feel like.

So here I was driving back here for the first time in 8-9 years after moving away 13 years ago. I saw that sign, “Oxford/Anniston” that for 7 years I saw over and over. As I took the exit and pulled up to the light to turn left onto Hwy 21, I lowered all my windows, and I took in my first bit of air… it smelled the same, and I realized that I hadn’t realized that this town had a smell. But it did, it does, and I recognized it immediately…. it’s like trees and water and… something else I can’t identify. My sense of smell has always been keen and always been very closely tied to my memory. In the same way that a song can transport me back to something, and I feel every emotion again, my sense of smell does the same thing. As I drove up Hwy 21 close to midnight on Friday night and felt the warm breeze in my face, I was bombarded by memories, many I had never forgotten, and some long since buried that whacked me in the chest as though to say, “You think were you just going to forget about me?”

There was the gas station that use to have that ice cream shop inside… I wonder if it’s still in there.  There’s the law office where I worked when I was finishing college… I still know and love Hank and Kaye… how lucky was I to land there soon after arriving in this town? I learned so much during those 2 years. And the side of me that was so open to the lives and experiences of others that were different from my own was fed, daily, by people coming to our office with their own personal dilemmas, tragedies, and life stories. They filled me up, broke my heart, gave me insight I would not have otherwise had, and all of the many ironies that are for another journal entry at another time gave me an affection and profound respect for my boss and his soon to be wife that I have never lost but have grown to appreciate even more over time.

There’s the road that takes you to the bus manufacturing company where I worked the last years I lived in Anniston - where would I begin to describe that whole experience - the good, the bad, the ugly, but so so much GOOD. There’s 10th St Mountain where I lived during my last few years here… where I have some of the sweetest memories even post-heartbreak… sleeping in on Saturdays and waking up to the sound of my car being washed for me just outside my bedroom window by the person who wasn’t scared off by the pieces of me that had to be reassembled after my divorce, the smell of the coffee sitting on the night stand next to me that had become a habit of his since day 1, and a different future in front of me than I had imagined when I first drove through the town those few years before with someone else.

As I keep driving up Hwy 21, I see the gym where my friend Joy and I use to put in some work in step aerobics to Marky Mark & The Funky Bunch, and I see the Pizza Hut where we’d go eat just afterwards, despite swearing we wouldn’t, is still there. I remember eating and shopping at this place, and that place, and oh my goodness, such & such is still there. This was all before my heartbreak, and I have visited these memories many times over the years. 

I passed the post office and saw where I was side swiped by a car making an illegal turn, I had been driving the first new car I’d ever purchased. I’d had a kidney infection that day and was miserable enough without the new hassle and stiffening neck and back. I had just passed by the row of crepe myrtles in the median of Quintard Ave, and I was immediately transported to my very first time seeing them, and I remembered so very clearly what I thought and said then. During that first drive through this part of town, I was sitting in the passenger seat next to my then-husband who was in the Army. We had gotten orders moving us from Germany to Fort McClellan, Alabama, and we were talking about how beautiful this median was. We were looking at everything closely… it was going to be our new home… our first home together in the US since our first 3 years of marriage at age 19 had been spent in Germany.  Ahhh the innocence, oh my naivety… I did not know then all of the devastation that was in my future. That day, I was the proud, excited wife. I was elated to be back in my own country, to experience all of the conveniences I had missed so much being overseas for the previous 3 years. There was the hope that my then-husband would be in the field less often and home more often. There was finally the chance for me to get back to college and finish up what I’d started before leaving my childhood home in Michigan. There was, quite simply, a world of opportunity in front of me. And I was ready for it with an open heart, an open mind, and all of the liberation a 22 year old feels when they’re finally able to start making their life what they want it to be. I hit the ground running.

But back to my trip up Hwy 21… my heart starts to ache as I see the upcoming exit I took many thousands of times to drive back home to the very first house I ever purchased. And there’s Fort McClellan on my right… the whole reason I ever came to this place to begin with back in 1996. 

As I passed the exit I would normally take to my old house, while I was for a moment that ambitious, deliciously naive young lady who had not yet experienced life shattering divorce, I was simultaneously now also the one that was fresh from that experience as more memories flooded me and the contrast of the feelings each of those version of me represented. I was now the one who sat at the light to get onto the highway and felt my heart on the floor by my feet, who still pondered question after question, why me, why this, anger, hurt, resentment, pain, love, confusion, and then all of those things again and again. And again. I was mourning the children I had already been picturing in my mind that we would have together. I was mourning starting over at 26 years old, which for me at that time seemed so very old, expendable, and used up. I was the person sitting in my car at another light a year later hearing Nelly Furtado’s “I'm Like a Bird” coming on the radio, “You’re beautiful… that’s for sure…”, and as I sang the words that day back in 2001, I looked up and saw the person who was just my friend from work at the time but would, 3 years later, become my husband, driving by perpendicular to me, singing the same song. Something inside me then, seeing someone who was my friend, someone who cared about me, someone who knew nothing of the pain I was in since I had not yet spoken of any of these things to anyone, singing this same song as me on his way to… somewhere different than me… gave me hope and calmed me. I don’t know why… it doesn’t correlate to anything really… it just calmed me.  And I remember that moment every single time I hear that song no matter where I am even today. And when I think of my friends I still have in this town today, that’s what they all do for me. They calm my overactive mind and heart. So I felt excited to see the ones I could see during this short visit, and I felt comfort just knowing they lived in this town even if there wasn’t going to be enough time to see them all. 

I kept driving, and I passed by the apartment complex where we lived before buying our house. Further down, there’s the hotel where we stayed before getting our orders completed and the keys to our new apartment. The hotel has the same name, and I see the very door to the room that was our home that first week. I turn right onto the base, which is now owned by the city of Anniston and has actual civilians living on it. It’s the same as I remember, but it’s different, because these people are living here permanently, decorating the outsides of their homes and their lawns with wreaths and other things. I almost stop at the old guard shack where you had to show your military ID, and I remember that I don’t need to do that anymore, and anyway it has now been 17-18 years since I had that ID. I drive down a road and picture vividly the deer that I always encountered in that area, and I see roads that I remember turning off for various reasons… either to head to the track to run, to the commissary and PX, to the military doctor’s office, to meet my then-husband for lunch. But that track. I worked through some serious s*** running that track every night, running up and down those concrete steps in between miles. I can still hear the soundtrack that came through my ear buds in my mind… a Whitney Houston remix “It’s Not Alright, but it’s ok, I’m gonna make it anyway”. I always turned it up to max volume so I wouldn’t hear the sobs coming out of my mouth, and I ran harder.

This weekend has been surreal for me, as every turn, every image, every breath fills me with memories that overload my senses exponentially more than a TJ Maxx. I lost so much in this town, I gained so much in this town, and for 7 years in my 20’s, in many ways, I grew up in this town. I had to leave it; I knew about half way through those 7 years that I would go somewhere else at some point because I had dreams of graduate school, specifically law school at the time. And I needed to be in a bigger city. I didn’t know that it would end up happening the way it did. I didn’t know that my then-husband would become someone to me that I didn’t recognize, that the same would be true of a really good friend of mine, and that at the same time I would pine for the one I thought he was down to the very cells that made up my body. I didn’t know that it would take so long to get through that process. I knew but I didn’t know that I would feel searing pain at imagining him being with someone else in the beginning. And I definitely didn’t know that I would end up finding love again with a friend of mine and be married once more before I left the town several years later. This new man healed the most damaged parts of my heart in ways I didn’t know was possible. I don’t think I would have been open to trial & error with someone I didn’t know, so it made sense that it happened with someone I was friends with first, that I had known him while he was in other relationships and seen the sort of man he was when there was no expectation of any relationship with me… after all, I was happily married, right? And equally consequential is that I got to know my future step daughter as a friend first. I came to this town with someone that I was no longer with half-way through my time here, and I left it with someone with whom I had only experienced happy things with. He and my other friends here were those I knew before, during, and, after. And those people - while they didn’t know what was going on with me while it was going on - they cared for my heart throughout regardless, without even realizing it. And so this town represents for me not just pain but also healing. So I guess it should be no surprise that my experience here this weekend has felt so… heavy. 

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