#faithandmemory — Public Fediverse posts

12 Hours and 35 Years Away

Tomorrow we will begin driving twelve hours after thirty-five years away.

Not all at once.

We will break the road in half, the way long journeys are sometimes remembered: mile by mile, meal by meal, rest stop by rest stop, the landscape changing slowly outside the windows.

We could have flown. Instead, we are going by car. Because when I was a boy, going somewhere meant driving. Long stretches of highway. Back seat bickering. Road signs. Pencil games on paper. Gas stations. Maps folded and refolded. Honking one state into another.

Are we there yet?

How many more miles?

Distance had texture then. Travel took time. A place did not suddenly appear on a phone or beneath the wings of an airplane.

We approached it gradually.

Perhaps that is how I need to return to Mississippi too. Gradually. Twelve hours on the road. Thirty-five years in the other direction.

There are places we leave, and there are places that never quite leave us.

Lost Gap was never much of a town. More a name. A bend. A place between places. A railroad memory. A gap in the map. Even the name sounds like something misplaced.

Lost Gap.

As a boy, I’m not sure I realized how strange the name was. Children often accept the names of things as if God has written them directly onto the landscape. Lost Gap was simply where we lived. A few miles outside Meridian—the Queen City, the railroad hub, the place where roads and tracks seemed to know where they were going.

Lost Gap seemed to represent something different. How to be present. How to disappear. Both at the same time.

I remember Mississippi as heat. Not poetic heat. Not the soft golden heat of somebody’s nostalgic South. I remember humidity thick enough to wear.

I remember summer fields and strawberry rows, cutting weeds with a long-handled hoe while the sun beat down and the orange water jug waited impossibly far away at the end of the row.

Water became holy. A pointed paper cup. A few swallows. Then back out to where the hoe waited in the field.

Some memories are not stories exactly. They are sensations that have survived inside my body.

Heat.
Thirst.
Red dirt.
Sweat.
The long shimmering row to water.

Maybe that is why childhood places become so powerful. They give memory a kind of strange physical color. A smell can open a door that’s been closed for thirty-five years. A certain tree line mimics an inner garden of mimosas. A railroad crossing jars a dozing mind. An evening insect sound brings the boy inside out to listen at the window screen. Suddenly the distance collapses and the memory within has come full circle into the present.

I have spent most of my life away from Mississippi now. Long enough to become someone else. Long enough that many people who know me today know almost nothing of the boy who lived there.

Yet I have discovered that geography gets under the skin. I can take the boy out of Mississippi. (The old saying knows what comes next). But I am not sure anymore whether the second half is blessing or warning. Because Mississippi gave me things I cherish.

Story.

Music.

Dark woods.

Southern voices.

Humming churches.

Cemeteries beneath crooked trees.

The sense that the dead are never entirely absent.

Lost Gap with its strange name and stranger silences. A place where stories seemed able to rise directly from the ground. Warm air moving where no person stood. Asphalt ending where something beckoned a boy on a bicycle to ride just a little further. Perhaps this is where my imagination learned its geography.

But childhood landscapes are never completely innocent. There are other ghosts there too. History. Race. Poverty. Violence. Things spoken aloud. Things never spoken aloud. Things I saw as a child without understanding. Things I learned to name later.

The South can be beautiful enough to make me forget what happened there. The katydid hymns. The red silt creek. The evening light in the pines. The bright blooms of the magnolia. The boiling blue-black clouds. Sometimes beauty like kudzu grows thick over history. But it cannot erase it.

Soon we will drive back through all of that. Not drop suddenly from the sky into Mississippi, but enter it slowly. Through bug-splattered windshield glass. Across state lines. Past towns I may not remember. Through places that may stir something before I even know why.

That feels right. Because memory does not arrive all at once either. It comes in stretches. A winding road. A subtle smell. A faded name on a sign. A strange shape of land. A moment when the past sits down beside me in the car.

I wonder what remains. I wonder what has vanished. Lost Gap itself seems almost built from disappearance. A community without a zip code that never quite became a town. A place I and the world passed through.

Perhaps that is why the name has stayed with me. Lost Gap. Two words describing something missing.

Maybe every childhood eventually becomes a Lost Gap. I know something happened there. I can pin down its approximate location. I can walk the same ground. But I cannot quite recover what now only exists in my head.

Soon I may stand somewhere I once stood as a boy. The strange thing will be that he will not be there. And yet in some way he will.

He travels with me. The boy in the strawberry field. The boy watching miles accumulate through the car window. The boy listening to stories. The boy looking toward Meridian. The boy who had no idea that someday he would live hundreds of miles away and spend decades turning Mississippi into memory, story, music, metaphor.

I have written Lost Gap into songs. Into stories. Into imagination. Perhaps that is what I have done with the places I could not return to. I rebuilt them inside myself.

And perhaps this trip will show me that the Mississippi inside me has become very different from the Mississippi that actually exists.

That may cause some dissonance. Some buildings will be gone. Some roads will look smaller. Some distances that once seemed enormous may take five minutes to drive. Some people will be missing.

A place can survive my absence. But it does not wait for me. Thirty-five years happened there too. That may be the hardest thing to remember. I did not leave Mississippi frozen behind me. While I was becoming who I am,
Mississippi was becoming something else.

Soon two changed things will meet again. The place. And me. I do not know what I expect to find. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps too much.

Maybe some places should remain memory. Maybe some need to be visited again so memory can finally become whole.

Twelve hours is not very far. Especially when divided between two days. Thirty-five years is. But maybe the old road trips taught me something. I do not have to cross every distance at once. I can enter it slowly. One road. One town. One memory. One mile at a time.

And somewhere along the way, perhaps without noticing exactly when it happens, the place I have been remembering will become a real place again. Lost Gap. Meridian. Mississippi.

Not behind me. Not yet ahead of me.

For now,

twelve hours

and thirty-five years away.