“Don’t cheat on your future with your past. It’s over.”
~ Maggie Calhoun
Welcome to Wishing Well. Population 6,445.
The headlights of my FI50 shone on a sign that I’d only driven past a handful of times in the last fourteen years. This time seeing it felt different. This time, seeing it was like a physical punch to my gut. The reason for the emotional blow was simple. Every other time I’d driven past it since I left when I was sixteen, it had been for a short visit, forty-eight hours at the most. This time I had no clue how long I’d be staying.
As I drove through my small hometown, I felt like I was stepping, or I guess driving, into a time capsule. My window was down, and it even smelled the same. The country air held unique scents that wafted into the cab of my truck. It was a combination of the dirt backroads, the fresh water from the river and Emerald Cove Lake, with a woodchip base from the lumberyard that was the main employer of the town.
To the casual observer, everything would appear the same as it had been during my childhood and teen years. But I noticed subtle differences. The two businesses that sat on opposite ends of the main strip, anchoring the small downtown area, had both been given face-lifts. The Best Little Hairhouse in Texas had a fresh coat of yellow paint and The Flower Pot now had a paved parking lot off to the side, replacing the gravel that had always been there. The wishing well, which inspired the town’s name, was still sitting proudly in the center of the town square, but was now lit up with twinkle lights that had not been there during my youth.
But one thing was still the same. The “a” on The Greasy Spoon diner sign that sat on the main strip still blinked. I wondered if Bud, who owned the diner, had left it that way for nostalgia.
As I pulled into the community center, I recognized half the vehicles in the lot. Unlike Los Angeles, where I’d lived for the past few years, people in Wishing Well didn’t trade up for new cars and trucks every year for the newest model. They drove their vehicles until they couldn’t anymore. I didn’t think my parents had ever traded in a car with under two hundred and fifty thousand miles on it.
I found a spot, parked, and shut off my engine. I stared at the doors with a sense of foreboding. For some reason, I just couldn’t bring myself to go inside, so I did what any millennial would do to procrastinate: I checked my phone.
There were seven missed calls, three voice messages, and four texts. I played the first voicemail and heard my manager Kurt Stanton’s voice.
“You were a no show for your PT this morning. Again. I stopped by your place and the doorman said that he hasn’t seen you in a few days. I’m getting worried. We need to talk. Call me.”
I pressed delete. We didn’t need to talk. My career was over. He knew it and I knew it. What was there to talk about?
The next message was from my PT, trying to reschedule my missed appointments. And the final message was from the pharmacy letting me know I had a prescription ready. A prescription of pain killers that I had no plans on picking up.
Laughter drifted in through my open window as a group of teenagers walked by, followed by another very familiar scent that I’d grown up with. When I was younger, I would have attributed it to a skunk. Now I knew it was good old Mary Jane—aka marijuana.
I didn’t judge the teens for getting high. I knew the pain of growing up in a town with nothing to do. There was no mall. No bowling alley. No skate park. We didn’t even have a movie theater. The town’s answer to that was putting on Movie Nights in the Park, where they projected movies onto the side of the only three-story building in town, which my family had attended almost as religiously as church on Sunday mornings.
I’d always felt trapped in this small town. I couldn’t count the number of pennies I’d tossed into that damn wishing well, hoping that I could get the hell out of this town.
I was only back now because one of my closest friends, Jackson Briggs, had called me a couple of weeks ago to tell me