1.

No matter how early I wake up, it is always a mad dash to the train as I sprint up the steps to the platform at Union Station. My black rolling carry-on bag thuds against every step behind me like a dead appendage, a paralyzed tail. By the time I step onto the train, my heart is beating so fast that I swear the woman next to me can see my left shirt pocket quiver with every pounding lub-dub. I’ve always had a hummingbird heart.

The chugging of the train, slow at first then rapid in its beat, is the only sedative that calm the flightiness of my body­­. I watch rusted steel pipes and abandoned factories and yellow winter grasses, and I begin to doze. The sleep is always superficial, dreams interrupted by the perpetual anxiety that I have missed my stop — or in this case by the Jersey women two rows behind me who are talking about potato salad, bikini waxes, and hot flashes. Sometimes I awake to find peaceful Connecticut towns with white washed houses, red brick storefronts, and scroll-like wrought iron lampposts, and in these moments, I question if I am still asleep. Despite the disparate images that pass me by, the quality of the light is always a consistent gray.

The skyline of New York City hits my body like a surge of adrenaline. It is my cue to gather my belongings and begin moving again. As I step off the Amtrak and onto the shuttle to the airport, I condition my body. My strides become precisely three floor tiles in length, my shoulders rigid, my eyes locked in position, my face expressionless. It is like this when I arrive in Chicago and hustle to my last terminal of the journey as well. I am a pinball traveling at constant speed, bouncing from wall to wall.

But when the plane begins to descend into Louisville, Kentucky, as I begin to trace familiar roads and highways to my home, the cogs in my body begin to slow. I imagine expanses at the side of the road with nothing but trees. There are no stimuli here. No future for me, only past. Tonight I will sleep in a near-dead torpor. The sleep that every hummingbird hopes to sleep when it returns home for the night.

2.

Louisville’s Lewis and Clark bridge is notable in that it doubles as a walking path for pedestrians. It follows the precedent set by the city’s Big Four Bridge which is known to most people as The Walking Bridge, plain and simple. In terms of pedestrian experience, however, both bridges offer very different selling points. The Walking Bridge is invigorated by its proximity to Louisville’s downtown. It is the capstone of the city’s Waterfront Park, which is in itself loved by indie music nerds, public radio contributors, and drunk high schoolers alike for its series of free summer concerts. At night, the bridge’s suspenders are outlined with color-shifting lights, and in the spring, it is the launching site of the pièce de résistance of the Kentucky Derby Festival: the firework waterfall. This is exactly what it sounds like — fireworks launched off a bridge and into a river. To those who grew up in Louisville, it will always be pure magic.

The Lewis and Clark Bridge is perhaps less exciting than its downtown counterpart in terms of urban activity, but this is not to say that its location in the suburbs makes it any less interesting. To cross the river from Indiana is to see Kentucky’s hills extend out to the east. It is to trace dirt path lanes that run parallel to the river and cut through spacious lots. With no city to distract you, you take in the muddy brown water of the Ohio River on overcast days. On sunny days it is greener, but still very much brown. You might notice a bald eagle nesting high in a tree or a barge hauling tons of coal, the unbeating heart of a mountain not too far away. As you get closer to the Kentucky side, you read a blue sign that says “Kentucky: Unbridled Spirit” and “Birthplace of Lincoln.”

A mere 500 feet away at the side of the walking path ramp, there is a peeling, white-washed farmhouse. Its blood red Confederate flag flies on the winds that rip through the Ohio River valley. If you are walking, you walk a little faster. If you are running you sprint past it, the irony and incongruence burning within you like cheap bourbon sipped in the absence of friends. Although the Lewis and Clark Bridge was completed almost three years after the Walking Bridge, it feels much older. It enchants you like home, wet grass and hickory trees, but it betrays you too.

3.

In my suite, there is a game we like to play under the glowing canopy of string lights in our common room. The task is simple on face value: describe your ideal life in 10 years. No restrictions or rationalizations necessary. Just an unadulterated game of adulthood à la spitball. But even for the most seasoned player, this can be a challenge. Over many iterations of the 10 Year Game, we have found that it usually helps start with place. “Where do you see yourself living in 10 years?” is an easier question to answer than “What kind of person do you want to spend the rest of your life with?” or the very scary “Where do you see yourself professionally?” We play with the knowledge that all answers fall into place in time, for some more quickly than others.

But each player’s story always starts out the same way. There is always a dumbfounded stare. A moment of silence. From the way we sit in a circle and stare so intensely at one another, you’d think we were patients in a counseling group, and perhaps we are in a way. Daily minutia consume us, although no one acknowledges it. This denial makes mourners of us too — we are people trapped in the first stage of grief, struggling to accept the loss of something we didn’t know was lost.

On an overcast day in Louisville, Kentucky, I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling fan. Today I am the loose balloon. I spiral higher and higher into the endless blue sky of my mind, getting lost there. I am vaguely aware that I might pop and plummet to my doom, and I am also (mostly) ignoring this possibility. It is an uncanny feeling that comes over me on cloudy days, the same feeling that accompanies exiting the theater after a movie or leaving your dorm room for the very last time. It is the friendship bracelet that no longer fits your wrist, the one in the rubble of your closet floor. It is the vanishing of a story and the harrowing vacuum it leaves behind.

For lack of an alternate purpose, I pick up my pen and journal. For lack of a story to write, I make one up. For better or worse, I find myself playing the 10 Year Game yet again.

Stories About Home was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.