1
NOELLE
The drive home feels both familiar and strange after spending months away.
Every curve of the road is imprinted in me. It’s the same bends I took as a teenager when I was too eager to be anywhere but here.
The gas station on the corner still flickers its old neon sign, and the old barn past the first turn into town still leans at the same angle it did the day I left.
Yet there’s something foreign about it all too, like looking at an old photograph where the colors have shifted with time.
The winter sky looms above me, pale and heavy, promising snow that hasn’t yet decided to fall.
It stretches endless across the horizon, the kind of muted gray that feels both comforting and ominous.
My tires hum against the pavement, the heater rattling faintly as it pushes warm air into the cabin. The smell of coffee clings around me, a last remnant of my stop two towns back.
Nostalgia presses at me. Not in the sweeping, romantic kind of way like I’d expected, but in small pinpricks that have me shivering under my winter coat.
I grip the wheel tighter and exhale, steadying myself for whatever version of “home” is waiting for me once I reach it.
By the time I turn down the last familiar street, my fingers ache from clutching around the wheel too tight.
Oddly, the houses look different than I remember.
Each porch light is a muted, stubborn little flame cutting against the gray backdrop of the sky.
Some of them haven’t changed at all—the same rickety staircases leading up to their worn front doors.
Others have been spruced up, painted colors that don’t quite fit in with the memory I carried with me before I left for college.
The closer I get to Dad’s place, the more my chest tightens.
For a moment, I picture myself at seven years old, brown curls untamed and my legs too short to pump my bike pedals properly, my dad’s steady hand on the back of my seat, propelling me forward.
He never told me when he’d let go, and it wasn’t until I had been halfway down the street that I realized I’d left him behind.
Kind of funny how eventually that would happen for real.
That memory still makes my throat ache just thinking about it.
Finally when the house comes into view, I ease my foot off the gas.
The siding could use a fresh coat of paint, and the shutters are hanging crooked from the last big rainstorm that hit our sleepy little town, but other than that it’s the same place I remember.
Same roof that sheltered me all my growing-up years, the same windows that glowed warm when Mom was still alive and the world felt contained in our small little bubble.
Sometimes I wish I could go back to those days, to simpler times when life felt easier.
I park in the driveway and cut the engine.
For a second, I just sit there, staring at the front door. Everything looks the same, just as it always does each Christmas I come home.
But sitting here now with my hands still gripping the steering wheel, these past few years might as well have been a lifetime.
There had never been a real reason I wanted to leave my hometown.
I didn’t come from a broken home, and there were no suffocating secrets locked away in my family’s closet.
