I’ve lived in three small towns, but sometimes I forget which one I’m remembering. They blur together in fragments—the same lone gas station on the edge of town, the same brick church, the same hush that settles over the streets after sunset.
I moved the first time when I was thirteen, again at seventeen, again at twenty, and each place felt both new and familiar—like a warped reflection of the last. Each move felt less like starting over and more like shifting sideways into another version of the same nowhere. I was always close to belonging, but never enough to stay.
People like to talk about small towns as if they’re simple—safe, slow, close-knit. But there’s a strange kind of performance that happens in places where everyone knows everyone. You learn what to say at the grocery store, which streets to walk, which topics to leave alone. Gossip fills the silence like humidity; it seeps into every conversation, every Sunday service, every passing glance. These towns seem to exist outside of time and apart from the rest of society.
I like to think of these places as “nowhere” towns.
Each move taught me how to adapt without ever fully belonging. I learned how to slip into the rhythm of a place—how to walk like I’d always lived there, how to blend in just enough not to be noticed. But there was always a thin layer of glass between me and everyone else, an invisible reminder that I hadn’t been there “back then,” when whatever story they were telling had begun. In every town, I was a visitor who stayed too long, a local only in the present tense.
Sometimes people ask where I’m from, and I never quite know what to say. I could list the towns like a map of half-lived lives, but none of them feel like an answer. I don’t know what home feels like—whether it’s the place you leave behind or the place that follows you everywhere. Each town left a faint mark: dust blowing in the wind, the way the clouds looked before a heavy monsoon rain, the sound of cicadas at night. I carry those memories like fragments from places I almost belonged to, but when I try to put them together, they never make a whole.
What’s strange is how similar these “nowhere” towns are, no matter how many states lie between them. They all have the same hollowed-out downtowns, the same dingy strip-malls, the same sense of time moving slower than everywhere else. People stay because it’s what their parents did; others leave and come back anyway, pulled by something they can’t quite name.
Maybe that’s what binds these places together—a feeling of being suspended in-time, caught between here and elsewhere. Living in them taught me how to read small things for meaning: the yellow blinking of a lone stoplight, weeds pushing through cracks in the pavement, the knowing glances neighbors share.
When I think of those towns now, I see them as a series of flashes: the brick church under a gray sky, the empty playground swings, the hush that always seemed to settle at dusk. I’ve carried them with me, etched into the way I notice light, silence and the spaces in between people.
Maybe I’ll never know what home truly feels like, and maybe that’s the point. Being from nowhere has taught me to move through the world with my senses open, listening for the faint whistling of places most people pass right by.
