I feel guilty for not being here,

I become an empath here. Right here. Right where I am sitting. Right where I laid down last night and overlooked the town from my window. The house that sits on a hill. All I could hear was the buzzing, the humming, the soft melodic song that the grain elevators used to sing. I sing along, the Siren song of this small village. I feel lured back in, back where I didn't belong.

I still wear those mittens, the tattered ones I took from your Mom two Christmas's ago and never gave back. The purple dye bleeds onto my fingers and my thumb has begun to peek through, bearing my skin to the cold. I don't think about her when I put them on, anymore. Just annoyance at the loose threads and the inability to keep the warmth spread out on my hands. I'm sure she didn't mean for me to keep them. I loved her more than you did. I stayed longer than I should have. I stayed long enough to watch your Father sit in his car, passed out over the steering wheel. I stayed long enough to watch your Mother try to coax him back into the house, into a warm bed. I stayed long enough to watch you curl up inside of yourself. I stayed long enough to feel the satisfaction in that. I stayed much too long. The mittens your Mom sent me last Christmas, the grey fuzzy ones, are buried or lost. I much prefer these tattered ones. I much prefer the broken ones. The ones that make me forget about her.

Walking home, underneath the streetlights, underneath this nightmarish sky, I saw you playing violin on your balcony, you thought I didn't notice, I felt what you felt, soft and loyal, I love that part.

I always come to a blog post with nothing to say. I stare at the blank page and it feels awfully painful to write anything, somedays it feels like nothing but a chore. It shouldn't, because I'll switch over to another screen, a word document, and write something amazing, something truthful, something you'd really want to read. I pull away from it, move back to the blog post and wish I could write something profound. Instead, I write this, little randoms of nothing. Little paragraphs of insecure moments. I write about writing and make up excuses for it.

My niece, Hunter, went hunting with my Dad over Thanksgiving break, living up to her given name. She was excited about it, couldn't wait for her first kill, a pheasant, who gave up it's life in a small cornfield outside of my Dad's acreage so that she could have the taste of her hunt. She never ceases to amaze me, a ten year old little girl, who has an insatiable curiosity about nearly everything.

I've officially lived in Chicago for over a year now. Last year at this time I was counting down the days until I could move back home, closer to my family. I promised my Mom that I would give it a full year. I look back now, and couldn't imagine living anywhere else.