Despite the claims it can't be done, I went home again. Back to the verdant hills and kindly faces that made up the landscape of my youth. In a brief four days, five complete strangers struck up polite conversation with me - occassionally coupled with sage advice, such as: "You should move back down South, honeah" and "What you should do is throw away them Camels. You know they bad fo ya, too. Yeah, ya do!"

I do. But I can't stop sucking down cigarette after cigarette just the same. Heady with the sudden freedom to indulge in my vice wherever I am, restaurants and bars, unmolested by the violent glares of angry New Englanders I'd grown accustomed to shame-facedly acknowledging. One can only presume the tabacco farmers down here are what keep the hospitality coming.

I need a smoke, too. Shaky fingers drawing out 'just one more' as I stand with my best friend's brother on Love Circle, staring down at a Nashville I somewhat recognize, trying to ignore the close-ups: little versions of me in a black velvet vamp dress for prom, in a white car watching a rubberband ball bounding wrecklessly down the green hillside, in a van with boys I don't like who want to get me high and take me to Fairview. But this is everything back home.

On the way to my best friend's wedding we ride through Antioch, a town I'd nearly forgotten the history of, and we're pointing. "Remember when we had Christmas at Chance's house? Here's where he and I bought liquor on his 21st birthday." It's ex-boyfriend territory for her. For me, I see my kindergarten, a daycare I went to, and I see the apartment building where, twelve years before, I sat rocking in a corner, hungry, in the dark, eviction notice in hand, waiting for Mom to come home.

It's not that you can't go home. It's that you can't stand it when you do. Every turn like an acid flashback, stumbling in a city of echoes from sweet smiles and laughter to the sudden achey agony of every history. Left 30,000 feet above it all, weeping down like rain on all the things that refuse to wash away.