another boring romantic that's me

I never thought I would live in a town as small as this. As I was walking to the Farmer's Market this morning, Sonya and Mike drove past and picked me up in their little car. We shared a brief chat until they dropped me off across from the wildflowers of the market. Inside, I ran into Michael playing upright bass, Danny buying strawberries, and my thesis director all wild-haired and summery. On the way home, I ran into my hair stylist, taking down the "no parking" signs he'd made out of poster-board and stuck up in his windows to ward off the Farmer's Market crowd. He used to cut hair for John Cougar Mellencamp and his model wife (who live in this small town), and now he cuts mine. Cheap and amazing. Yesterday I turned on WFHB, Bloomington community radio, and who should be the DJ but the director of the Creative Writing program. I recognized her by her voice. She played the new Portishead. Whenever I do anything outside, such as holding class by the art museum's red doughnut sculpture, or tacking up signs for a yard sale, multiple people call me later to say that they saw me. The local bar really is the proverbial place where everybody knows your name.

It gets cloying at times, and I'm definitely ready to move on. Still, I'm so grateful, now that it's ending, to have known what this life is like. The kind of self you inhabit in a small town is as real, but in an inverted way, from that you inhabit in the anonymity of a big city. In the latter, I feel isolated from the buzz and thrust, and therefore myself in a solitary, observant way. In the former, you are forced into being yourself, because you are always apt to run into someone when you least feel like performing. The trade-off is that, since you get those sides of others too, there's only so much resentment you can feel about being caught in your dirtiest shirt or weeping in public.

And when you begin to notice that half-chewed corn husks or cloth flowers begin to appear regularly on your porch and lawn, you can't help but imagine that the person leaving them is well aware exactly for whom they are intended.