I count telephone poles. I count crows swaying on the wires. I count silos in the distance, arranged like fists. I turn my life into numbers, into accounting. For ten years I’ve lived in Chicago. I’ve been a lawyer for three. After six months in private practice, I landed a job at CEAW, the Center for Environmental Advocacy Work.

I have a future, a life, a clean and bright condo in Lincoln Park with dozens of bookshelves and not a single Bible. I meet friends in downtown Chicago bars and clubs and speakeasies where the cocktails have ingredients like lilac and egg white. I have friends now, period—and boyfriends, if you can call them that. As many as I want, nameless and indistinguishable, rotating in and out of my bed and life and on my own terms.

Most nights, I don’t even have nightmares anymore.

I swore, many times, that I would never go home. But now I know better. Any self-help book in the world will tell you that you can’t just run your past away.

Barrens has its roots in me. If I want it gone forever, I’ll have to cut them out myself.

—

Main Street. What used to be the chapel—a one-story concrete building with no windows where we used to go on Sundays, until my dad decided that the pastor was interpreting scripture as he pleased, infuriated particularly that he seemed too lax on “the gays”—is now a White Castle. The library where my mother used to take me to story hour as a kid now touts a sign for Johnny Chow’s Oriental Buffet. When I was growing up, we had practically no sit-down restaurants at all.

But so much is the same: the neon light from the VFW bar still flickers, and Mel’s Pizza, where I would ride my bike sometimes to get a slice after school, is still churning out pies. So much might have tumbled out of memory intact—the Jiffy Lube Pit Stop, Jimmy’s Auto Parts Supply, the run-down porn shop Kaycee Mitchell’s father used to own. Might still own, for all I know. Temptations has a new roof, though, and a new electric sign. So business has been booming.

I spot a crow on a telephone wire and another one nesting farther along. One crow for sorrow, two crows for mirth…

Past Main Street nothing looks the same: brand-new condos, a Jennifer Convertibles, a sit-down Italian place advertising a salad bar in the window. Everything is unfamiliar except for the salvage yard and, just beyond it, the drive-in movie theater. Site of many birthday parties with kids from Sunday school and even a depressing Thanksgiving right after my mom was buried. Our claim to fame, prior to the arrival of Optimal Plastics.

More crows perched on a pylon. Three, four, five, six. Seven for a secret, never to be told. A murder of crows.

Being back is giving me that tight-chest, lumpy-throat feeling. I grip the steering wheel tighter. At the first red light—the only red light in Barrens—I hold my breath and close my eyes. I am in control now.