You’re in the car that you’ve limped along
since the days of your high school years
that are further in the distance
every time you look.

In the passenger seat is a girl
who has been there a while,
now more of a woman
who you can’t quite equate
with the kid who stood alongside you
on stages and in classrooms
in tiny, nowhere towns
through what you thought
were your biggest, everything years.

Fields of nothing roll by
as midwest cities–
each one a carbon copy
of the one before–
fade to dust in the
rearview.

You swap stories about how
you each lost faith in 
your religion but maybe not 
your belief in a God,
under the shadow of billboards
declaring that
HELL IS REAL
and
JESUS SAVES.

She tells you how she knows
that no matter how far she strays,
she ultimately plans
to return home.
You say the opposite,
claiming with false bravado
that you can’t get far enough.

Secretly you know
that the odds are you
will end up back home too,
(you don’t know if 
should be resentful
or comforted
by that fact)
either by choice
or by failure.
(You think they might
mean the same thing)

Everything you know is behind you;
everything you think you know is ahead of you.
Every time you leave one and come back to the other
it seems like you know it a little less.

“Home” is no longer distinct,
falling somewhere between
the one you were given
and the one you’ve made:
what’s behind
and what’s ahead.
The girl who has always been beside you
has grown up
and you’re not quite sure if 
you have too.
Every town is dying:
mere rest stops on the road 
to being forgotten.
Everything you try to leave behind
haunts the side of the road
and the inside of your soul.
Everything you try to hold onto
manages to leave or get left 
in one of those nowhere towns.

HELL IS REAL,
the billboards remind you,
in case you try to forget.

But the road still stretches
ahead of you.
There’s only one direction to go.

You don’t know where it’s taking you.
You’re not there
yet.