If I call it a curse, then it seems unpreventable. It's an unavoidable truth, not something I've done wrong. If I call it a curse, then it isn't my fault it's befallen me. If I blame it on this town, this county, this state, this region, then it is out of my control. It isn't me, I swear it. It's just the Midwest curse.
I feel it on my neck when I try to leave the bounds of this place. A loosely-tied noose that tightens the further away I get until I'm suffocating. I can't breathe anywhere else, so it must be safer to stay. The red hats, the American flags, and the wrong name spoken at family dinners. It's safer, I try to say, though the blood runs thick off my palms. I've sliced open every one of my fingers trying to hold onto this place, but when it holds fast to me, holds me in return, it steals my breath. None of this feels good.
I call it a curse because that's what it seems like. I was cursed at birth because I was born in the wrong place. My mother begs me to go, not because she wants to miss me, but because she could not leave herself. Still, after all her children are grown and moved out, she doesn't leave. I wonder if there's a timer on this curse, like it worsens with age and time spent in this place. Have all my moments of brief separation given me back a little? Or am I doomed to end up like my mother, trapped in a town I despise filled with too many people I know and don't love? If there is a timer, surely mine hasn't run out yet. So why do I tempt it by settling in?
I'm renting my own space next year. A one-bedroom apartment for my cat and I to settle into for the next couple of years, if all goes to plan. It's stupid to make such plans, I know. Still, I outline them in the blood drawn from my finger tips and sign it with my legal name. That's how I know it's getting bad, when I accept the name I was born into, not the one I'm known for. I don't think I haven given up and accepted the curse's hold on me, but maybe I'm too far gone to notice. That must be how it gets you. It makes you comfortable, keeps you confident that you can leave if you want. Like a creeping addiction, you don't know it has you in its talons until it's far too late. Now, you have a problem larger than life to break free of. How does one quit a drug they were born to love? How do I break a curse I didn't ask for, but sure as shit am not fighting to get out of?
I want to get out. I want to break the Midwest curse that demands you stay put. I want to see the oceans, the mountains, the world outside of flat roads flanked by cornfields. I fear it's too late for me. I'm barely 25, and I feel like I've wasted time in not fleeing as soon as I could. I'm tethered to a place I hate with every fiber of my being.
Maybe that's untrue. I love my friends, my family even if some of that love is reluctant, and there are some good spots to hide out around here. Maybe I hate it with most of my being, not all of it. Whatever, point is that I don't love it here. I never have. Ever since I was the weird kid on the playground playing pretend and getting asked out as a joke. I think, but I don't know for sure. I've had my heart broken too many times to know if I can blame it on the town anymore or if it's my fault.
No, not my fault.
This town is haunted by all of our pasts. They cling to the brick walls of the depot alleyways. They watch from the top windows of the promenade. They follow me down 70 and every side street because I can't outrun them. I cannot escape them here, so I need to escape this place.
I need out. If I weren't so broke, maybe I'd be living on either coast by now. I'd be living a different life surrounded by different faces and maybe even haunted by new ghosts. The promise of the possibility for better keeps me dreaming of the day I finally leave, and I don't look back. The day I can settle down somewhere far enough to need a plane ticket to return to my hometown. Far enough that I can issue the ultimatum to my family of respecting me or not seeing me ever again. I can't do that when I live 10 minutes down the road. I can when I live a plane ride away. I dream of that day.
The curse keeps me scared this will always remain but that: a dream. I have to make the best of it while I'm here, I claim. I fear that means the curse is strengthening its grasp on my heart. Keeping me soft for this place in any way so that I'm complicit in the curse catching up to me. When I grow old and die in the same town I was born in, it will seem to be all my fault. And maybe it would be. I might've made this whole "curse" thing up to make myself feel a little better and a little less hopeless. This town makes me hopeless.
But if I call it a curse, then it's not my fault I'm still here, that I've come back after almost leaving. It's not my fault I don't have plans to leave yet. It's not my fault for not hating it through and through. It's not my fault. It's not.
It's just the Midwest curse.