Candy-Apple Town
Candy-Apple Town
Something strange and beautiful and haunting happened today. Think The Exorcist but with butterflies and tears mixed up of joy and grief and wholly happiness. I was on the treadmill at the gym walking nowhere at four miles per hour with a ten percent incline when a song came on where the guy is singing to his girlfriend that he’s leaving “this candy-apple town” and moving to New York City to find himself while pursuing his dreams as a musician. Which means he’s leaving the New Jersey Shore carnival town and becoming a street performer in the City which can be a decent career if you’re any good but nowhere near enough annual income to survive in the Big Apple. He would be better off commuting.
I started to tear up as the simple song played on. My mouth got real tight and the corners turned down which is what I look like when trying to let the emotion rise to the surface to set it free but don’t want to look like a middle-aged bundle of hormonal tears while walking nowhere on a treadmill. I imagine to others I just look really, really pissed off.
The emotion came up which needs to happen so I can get a good look at it and understand what the message is before I set it free. What I saw was one of those grainy home movie reels that whir and click-click-click and play a memory on an old sheet tacked to a wall. There were lights and dinky rollercoasters and flashing signs that coaxed visitors into smoky arcades. I imagined the sounds of distant screams and metal wheels as people spun around and around on whirling tea cups. And the sound of balloons popping from metal tipped darts as teenage boys proudly won stuffed bears for their girlfriends. It’s funny how these memories are a mix of my own childhood experiences and Hollywood films. Of course I couldn’t hear any of this in my head, probably because by this point in my daydream Eminem was telling me through my earbuds to grab my one shot in life.
In this movie-reel memory there were two characters my focus moved to. My father and I, as a little girl, maybe five or six year old. We were walking hand-in-hand away from the camera. Just me and him. And my heart ached for the young father who did his best for us, who died six years ago leaving me, a grown woman and mother of two, to realize, finally, how powerful his love for us was. Is. I looked so small in this memory, but so, so safe holding hands with him.
Back on the treadmill, in a brightly lit gym with gray and blue walls and way too many tvs for my liking, this little girl filled me up. I filled me up. We have finally been reunited after all these years. Maybe she never left but was buried alive under years of shoulds and shits-that-don’t-matter. But I feel whole today. More whole than I have in a long, long time. And content, knowing I will never be alone again. I never really was, was I?
Before the end of the Eminem song I recognized what the message was. I have spent most of my life wanting and wishing to be seen and heard, yet I have never paused long enough to truly see and listen to myself. I’m ready now.
