In Hallmark and Hallmark-style movies, the romantic interest living in a faraway city returns to their hometown to see their family, runs into a few old friends at a bar, and ultimately gives up their fast-paced urban life for the comforts of this familiar community. In real life, though—at least as I’ve encountered it—there’s little fondness for these towns. If our parents still live there, we might pay a grudging annual visit, spending one night drunk at the local pub with fellow holiday visitors and the few old classmates, alien to us now, who have never left.

Both the Hallmark heroines and the real-world emigrants talk of the initial choice to leave as a desperate escape. Of years plodding through life in a miserable town until they could finally go off to university or get a faraway job or travel the world.

Me? I hated leaving. I cried, not just when I first moved out of town, but after Christmas visits and weekend pit stops and spring break, too. My last years in my hometown had been, in some ways, the most fun I’d ever have: playing Twister with colored shaving cream and running from a ramshackle sauna into a back lot pond and tucking into tractor buckets to cross streams and joyriding on country roads with the windows down and stargazing beside a pallet fire.

My departure wasn’t meant to be permanent. I would spend four years getting a degree, then rejoin my friends, most of whom stayed near the town, and we would build our lives together. Man plans, God laughs.

I came out a little over a year after I left. I’m hesitant to paint all small towns with too broad a brush, but mine fit the stereotype: you can be happy if you are white, cis, straight, centrist-to-conservative. Coming out meant ending one relationship on purpose and dozens as collateral.

To many of my high school friends, I simply disappeared. I assumed that the grapevine of small-town gossip had thoroughly exposed me. My visits became scarce and brief, popping in only long enough to see my parents and the few friends who’d survived the fallout. I cowered in the grocery store and shrank into corners at church, fearful of encountering someone from whom I’d fled.

I functioned on assumptions. I acted on behalf of those I figured would reject me. I left little space for doubt, no avenues for reconnection. I became used to telling people about the bridges I burned, but that’s not quite right. I didn’t burn them. They were drawbridges, and I lifted my side so far that I couldn’t see the other side. I didn’t know that some of them stayed down.

There was a plan for my life: get married, live near town, have babies that could grow up among the children of my closest friends. I gave up that plan, but many of my friends did not. I’ve watched from afar as that life plays out, in many variations, among those who stayed. The life I could have—would have—had, often in vivid detail. My place in family photos, my vacation destinations, my “we bought a house!” status update. 

The girl working toward that life is gone, but I still have her memories. I’ve been back in town—home, I still call it—for a month, the longest I’ve been here in seven years. Every inch of this place is immersed in reminders: that’s the gas station where the truck broke down and we made a scavenger hunt in this neighborhood and a cop shined a light into our car at that park and this is where my favorite teacher lived and—

And these are my friends. I’ve reconnected with more people than I could have imagined over casual dinners and late-night coffee runs and in the lobby of my parents’ church. People who want to see me, who seem to treasure our shared past and potential future too. 

They don’t prod about my personal life, and I don’t volunteer information—I couldn’t tell you what they believe about my life and my eternal fate, whether they’ve changed their minds over the past seven years or further rooted themselves in philosophies that oppose my flourishing. If I were a Hallmark girl, I’d move back and learn the truth over time. I don’t need—don’t want—to know. I want to love the people and the place that contributed to many of my most cherished memories. I can’t stay here, but I can’t abandon it either.

Gwyneth Findlay

Gwyneth Findlay is an editor living in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, where she mentally and physically collects world maps. She graduated from Calvin in 2018 with a degree in writing and minors in French and gender studies.