Small Town Livin’ and Leavin’
Why I left as soon as I had the chance
I grew up in the kind of town you leave behind. The one selling pickled eggs at the rundown, redneck-owned gas stations where the floors hadn’t been swept in a good five years and no one had any inclination toward mop usage. Places which didn’t warrant specks on a paper map or a stoplight; where invasive bamboo hid people’s marijuana crops and teenagers at night. When not making out and playing drunken games of tag in the cemetery passed empty, unhassled hours of going nowhere; we were low future prospects getting high in the city’s one park which shared the block with the police station.
There was no such thing as gender equality, although this policy hung as an unspoken burden in the air. That is, unless you really got into it or crossed the wrong path with a man, even a man who was a stranger to you. It passed along as the way-it-is-truth from women just as much. I remember in third grade becoming frustrated with a math problem I couldn’t find my way to solve and my cis female school teacher telling me not to worry about trying to finish it because, “Girls aren’t good at math anyway.” Her husband taught calculus at the local high school.
Segregation was still a thing with active deniability in place. In high school, I was repeatedly warned against and ultimately forbidden…
