It didn’t matter how happy I was, or how perfect my summer was going, I still couldn’t help but cry on my drive out of the Valley. I tried to sing along to the happy song on the radio and think of all the good things I had waiting for me to go back too, but I couldn’t hide or cover up this feeling of longing and homesickness I had for the Valley already. And how it felt right now to be removing myself from it, inching further and further away from the view.
Like a doe from its mother, or a sunflower without its sun. It always feels foreign and unnatural for me to leave the Valley. Like the marsh girl being ripped from her marsh. The geese scattered from their summer pond. There was something about this time in the summer and the way the light fell on the Valley as we were leaving it that made me think of my past; Gramma and Grampa, the garden, the raspberries, long runs on the tracks, the view from the overpass, the way the chlorine of Gramma’s pool clung to my skin, peanut butter ice cream sundaes, morning song’s view. There was this feeling of great youth and freedom in the glimmer of light that shone through my car windshield that I had never felt anywhere else in this great, big world. Only here. Only in the Valley.
Where just my house isn’t my home, but the whole horizon line; the sunsets, the smell of the hop house in the humidity, the crescent moons, two bonfires always burning at once. That was home. All of it. And it didn’t matter how satisfied and happy I was with my life in Michigan, it only made me realize how the Valley takes ahold of me when I’m there and fights to not let me go. How when I always do leave, it hurts my heart with sadness, like a slow breathless death. How the Valley yearns for me, like I do for her. Apart from the other, we are not quite whole.
A piece of me is always left in the Valley when I do leave, as I drive away with tears in my eyes, and my boyfriend slowly reaches for my hand and tells me it will be okay. Because we both know it will be. My heart will ache and patiently wait for it to be back in its native homeland again. Back to its roots. Once a Valley girl, always a Valley girl.