Homecoming

I recently enjoyed my first homecoming. And it’s funny, you know, I never went to the dances in high school, the football games where some of us smoked cigarettes over the small, dewy green hill at the tree line past the Friday night lights and the roaring noise. I’ve catered and cooked for them, sure. I’ve slaved for literally thousands of people, sometimes five to six thousand, that came to our campus in Pennsylvania at the small, rural conservative college in the last couple years.

I came back to Cleveland in October to take a step back from being a career-minded, salaried chef. I moved in with family. I put thoughts and stuff in storage for forty-eight dollars a month across town.

If you can’t inspire yourself, you’ll never inspire others. Truth. Yes, this is my homecoming. That’s what I tell myself. Those were also the first thoughts when I came to an epiphany about a rejected manuscript of short stories recently, a many times rejected manuscript. Sometimes, I don’t feel like I have much to say about life and then along comes writing again.

We all deserve to be inspired in life.

I’ve never been carried on the backs of cheerleaders or football teams. I leave salary and go hourly across town, across state. Same company, but they try to terminate me in the process. I lose benefits, I lose retirement funding. I lose corporate identity and shed it like a snakeskin. So, I continue. I move on and forward, getting half of those back and leaving a part of myself.

We’re four months in now and this is a process the soul tells me. I enroll in the four year, online journalism program once and for all, for finally. This is how to take the tiny steps: the credit hours are affordable, cheaper than most, and they accept previous schoolwork, things I picked up in small classes before getting salary and leaving for Pennsylvania. I have nothing more to say anymore. Nothing meaningful, anyways.

So, the date is set, January and the new year comes around and I get accustomed to being a student in my late thirties. I make the plans. For a single, child-less chef, I have good savings, a good credit score, a good work history. I plan my way to move to Colorado once and for all. I begin to say goodbye to the family in my own way, in letters and on their own time in fractured, individual ways like shattered glass or mirrors. This is where I’m at now and this is that moment. I wake up in the morning to say to myself this is how, when the dark curtain to the sun is cast aside, all that is left is the light.