FCKMA

4 - I Begin To Hallucinate

The thing about small towns in rural Midwestern areas is that you can’t escape from anything. As long as you know three people, you know the whole town by association and everybody knows everything about you.

The good thing is that I hadn’t been in town in a decade. People had moved in and out, gotten married. People have passed away, and others were born. I was honestly surprised as to how little I recognized in the town I had grown up in.

My parents had lived in the same two story house for as long as I could remember. Of course, this fact didn’t change when they decided to move us to California for my senior year of high school. They had rented out the old house so that they could still keep it.

Here’s a thing about Wisconsin in the winter. It’s cold. There’s snow everywhere, and the only people crazy enough to be outside are small children running about aimlessly and teenage boys who shovel the snow off the driveway in hopes it wins them points with their parents. I had been in both situations as a child, and I was happy to silently judge the freezing children as I walked up to my parents’ house with three layers of jackets and my Jansport backpack on my back.

I knocked on the front door –a gesture that made me feel immediately unwelcome, because it was once my home. I waited in the snow and watched it drift gently onto the hair that I was unable to force inside of my dark blue beanie. I waited a good five minutes before knocking again. The door finally opened and I saw my mother standing in front of me, before she gave me a hug.

“Thank goodness you made it here safe!” she said, releasing me from her tight grasp suddenly. She looked behind me. “Where are all your bags?”

I turned so that she could she my backpack, which I was still carrying on my back. “I only have the one,” I said.

My mother paused and squished her face into one of disapproval, but she didn’t say anything. She then snapped her attention to me and the door. "Alison! Close the door, for God’s sake. You’re letting all the cold in!”

I was surprised by her outburst, so I turned quickly to close the door, the force of my action causing whatever snow that had already landed on me to fall onto the floor. My mother clicked her tongue, making an annoyed sound. “Here, just take off your coat and your shoes, and you should be fine,” she said. She snatched the beanie off my head. “This too.”

My hair fell in disheveled heaps over my face, and I angrily blew them away. With my vision finally cleared, I could see the old house that I hadn’t stepped foot in in over a decade. I had to admit that I missed this place.

My eyes travelled to the stairway, where I was greeted by a vision of ten year old me chasing my friend outside with a snowball in my hand. I turned, watching the hallucination fling open the door and run outside, laughing incessantly.

“Ally?”

I shook my head, snapping myself back into reality. “Yes?”

“Are you okay?” My mother asked. I nodded. “Yes, why wouldn’t I be?”

“You seemed like you were a little lost there,” she noted. I shrugged. “Nope. I’m fine. I was just thinking about a few things. Nothing to worry about.” Gee, I should have a drinking game for how many times I’ve said that recently.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked my mother. I prayed to God that my father wasn’t thrashing around in the snow outside, convinced he was immune to hypothermia, and playing football with the neighbors kids.

“He’s upstairs. He said he’d be coming down shortly,” she said. “I’ll get you some hot chocolate so that you can warm up.”

My mother disappeared into the kitchen, and I made myself comfortable on the living room couch. It was weird to be in this house again, with absolutely no recollection of the feeling ‘home’. I felt like an outsider.