SMALL TOWN AMERICA is a strange concept. Everything is small if you put it into perspective. Everything is tiny if you think about it: irrelevant environments of strangers you've never known, you never will know.
There's a word for it, for a feeling you only ever get on a late night pitstop in a rural town in Connecticut. Somewhere you don't belong. I don't know. When you veer 15 miles off I-91 or I-84 to avoid a toll, being led down winding back roads, unlit, desolate, and you gaze distantly at its fringe of forest; an occasional dirt driveway harboring an F-150 or a Jeep; slanted shacks with dark, cloudy windows. Everything foreboding and foreign. You wonder who lives here—or there—and if you'd ever realized how much exists, how many people exist, each person intricately tangled in complexity, in tragedy you'd never know.
Everybody has a story.
Your backstory doesn't mean anything to them.
Unless your paths cross.
It delves deeper—thickets of trees thinning—and bends into a string of darkly lit businesses, gradually bunching up to a quaint Main Street. Everything awash in gravel-gritted silver light; deserted sidewalks unspool like film, a sleepy bedroom community in central Connecticut.
Businesses.
Salons. Bakeries. Banks. Who owns Betty's Bakery? Who is getting up in a few hours to open Sea Coast Credit Union? Who is asleep? Who is awake? Who's dead? Who's alive?
You wonder if it always looks so foreign, if you'd feel it cruising down Main Street in your own hometown by now. Because you can't quite remember it.
They are vague lives attached to vague buildings you ghost by quietly. Somebody probably smoked their first cigarette behind a TD Bank. Somebody probably had their first date at a Tito's Taqueria, probably fell in love with a Wes. It's no different. Our composition is always damningly intimate, relatable, by sheer coincidence. Everybody is created from a copy. Every story plagiarized. Retold.
It all existed before you.
Existential thoughts weren't a burden, but reprieve from boredom, being alone in cross-country chaos. Conversations, albeit single-minded, keep you busy. Every town some vague version of your previous pitstop, darker, falling away in your rearview mirror. Nothing ever worthy of remembering. I guess I could be at fault for forgetting.
I know I'm not alone in believing I've seen things, felt things, been followed. Paranoia is a finicky concept, too, mired in complexity. What about when you're being rational, when you know you're not hallucinating?
When you skirt into a cozy, duskily lit village, a quaint New England town, ripped from an abandoned set of a Hallmark Christmas. Probably some dense bitch named Holly leaving The Big City, ending up in an old-spirited dead-end rut in Connecticut called Snow Falls or some bullshit, learning The True Meaning of Christmas. Mom would watch it. Even if it isn't real, if it's fake, flimsy, a boring, overused trope you vocally despised. But, no. It's not your story. Don't tell anybody else's story.
Each dark window reflects your grey-gold silhouette, blurry, blearing by. It's an anxiously fleeting feeling of... trespassing into somebody else's territory. Nobody alerted. Quiet. Not a single soul awake at such an odd, black hour as you break for a roundabout, veer off uphill, itching to get far, far, far away. Details of dentists' offices, supermarkets, Leonard & Sons—empty doorways, frosty grass, icy gravel, ghoulish glints tricking your lightheadedness—arise in your side mirror: ALL OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.
Is it November yet?
It isn't cold.
Heat billows across your cheeks, your bare shoulders, and you hear it cranking, beneath a soft, staticky fizzing from your radio—103.7 FM. It had burned out before you'd left I-90. Now, it only crackles sporadically, patchy reception to a late-night block of Hits from the '80s. Somewhere barely reachable from wherever you've driven off-course: a rural Nuketown-esque shadow-self of a (slowly-shrinking) middle-class suburbia, I'd begun to believe.
I whisked my gaze around, searching for somebody, anybody, headlights flashing in hazy darkness, but only caught an eerie stillness, rippling as I slowed, slowed... slowed...
A stretch of ominous green traffic lights disappearing down Main Street. Nobody driving. Nobody walking. Every blur a side effect of sleeplessness. Every facade of a silhouette a hollow husk, a cardboard cut-out, an imitation of my own hometown so hauntingly similar it hurts to remember it didn't ever... exist.
It was yours, theirs, hers, his, and I didn't belong.
You'd already forgotten where you came from, conjured up your own visions, your own story, being lost in your wilderness year didn't stop you. It became a part of you. I couldn't shed a dark drowsiness, but I refuse to forget I saw it; I had no idea where I was, careening down a dirt road somewhere in backwoods Connecticut, and I saw her again.
Her chin lowered, brow upturned, pervertedly proportioned to look up. Beneath a ratty hood, big, bulging eyes, and a jagged, unnatural grin, splitting, corners cut up to her temples in a loose U.
Fear rattled my ribcage in icy cold awareness.
Connecticut was too close.
