The 2,571-Mile Ache

Rhode Island always tugs the heart back home

In Downcity Ink No. 1: How the tendrils of a Rhode Island childhood never let us go, even thousands of miles from home-home.

When I first read The 2,571-Mile Ache, by Molly Savard, I knew immediately that it was the perfect way to kick off this new mini lit journal. Like me, Molly grew up in Rhode Island and has remained tethered to it, loving it from afar even as she’s settled into a life on the opposite coast, in Los Angeles. When we spoke on the phone recently, we of course started with that obligatory script all Ocean Staters rattle through, laughing at ourselves for how excited we are to ramble about Rhode Island to strangers and friends, how much we talk about this place where we no longer live.

The Ache encapsulates what so many former Rhode Islanders feel for these 1,212 square miles of deep familiarity. Here, Molly explores that visceral pull back to the 401, that classic way Rhode Island seems to drag us all back home eventually as if we’re all giant human slinkies, venturing a little further and then a little further still, before we cave and snap back home for a visit.

Like Molly, I’ve spent nearly all of my adult life living far from home home. As a kid, I felt claustrophobic contained within the state’s borders, eager to discover what lay beyond. But it only took a month away at college in central North Carolina for me to begin to feel homesick for apple picking, beach days, and “hardy” New Englanders who didn’t wear winter coats in 60-degree weather. I remember the first time I saw the Welcome to Rhode Island sign up ahead, heading north from Connecticut to go home for Thanksgiving. I nearly cried with joy at the sight of what I’d once been so eager to leave behind.

Even now, well over a decade later, Rhode Island, and even more than that, my Rhode Island-ness, feels present even as I live an ocean away. My ears perk up at any stray use of the word island, the way they might for you when someone calls out a name that sounds similar to yours.

You may be able to leave Rhode Island, sure, but Rhode Island won’t ever leave you.

—Kassondra Cloos
Editor-in-Chief

The 2,571-Mile Ache

by Molly Savard

My cells start to buzz with recognition around New York. Soon we’ll U-turn over the Massachusetts Bay, breathe deep through the light battering of coastal winds. The turbulence doesn’t matter much; we’re close. Then, we’ll begin our descent into Boston. I’ll catch the Silver Line to South Station and the MBTA or Amtrak to Providence. We’ll whir past algae-green ponds and half-dead trees until the red brick of the old J. L. Clark Manufacturing building shocks the grey horizon.

I am almost home.

I left Rhode Island by plane eight years ago and have made the journey back many times. With each one, I feel every minute, every mile between me and the place that grew me. I can’t get to Manville fast enough, where I’ll sleep in the house I’ve slept in my entire life, the house my mother has slept in most of her life, in the village where we were both raised. Home swallows me in a familiarity that yawns back generations.

We go to Stop & Shop and Job Lot, delightfully novel experiences now that I no longer have access to them. I run the Blackstone River Bikeway and transcend self in the impossible incandescence of red maples. There are friends and family to see, updates to be traded over cold cans of ‘Gansett; the gonging of church bells and fish-and-chip fryer oil on the air. I drink in Rhode Island like I’m 10 years old at the dinner table with a strong glass of coffee milk. Could there be anywhere better?

—

In Los Angeles, a place where people from all over the world live, I am a bit of a curiosity. Rhode Island, people say, intonating with intrigue and maybe a bit of skepticism—not about whether I’m telling the truth, but about whether such a place even exists. I hear it’s really pretty there, they say, if they’ve heard anything at all.

Yes, I say. Some parts.

Depending on my audience, I mention the potholes or how every Rhode Islander is about one degree of separation away from another. Aren’t we cute and quaint, with our bubblahs and Dunkin’ diehardism and openly criminal politicians. They laugh, I laugh.

Depending on my audience, I mention the risk of tribalism bred by insularity: how, in a state where 71 percent of the population still looks like them, “working class whites” were just as hoodwinked into supremacy as those in the South—JFK Democrats led to betray even their own interests by the dog whistle specter of the “other.”

Depending on my audience, I mention that the concepts of family and community reign supreme, but in practice commonly play out as alienation and shame. That it’s a place where—despite its “founding” as a “lively experiment”—stasis among many of its longest-term residents is principle; cultural preservation veiling entrenchment against anything perceived as different.

Photo by Liubov Ilchuk on Unsplash

Rhode Island is me at 20 years old. I’ve just returned from four months out of the country and a part of me I’d never met has bloomed. In traveling and at college a state away, I’ve uncovered an expanded, technicolor version of my sexuality and gender. I’ve found life, time, the variety of people and experiences the world holds to be suddenly vast and gorgeously unknowable. Outside the confines of the small place I’ve lived since birth, I see there will always be something to learn. I am filled with possibility, more alive and free than I can remember.

It’s Christmas Eve. My mother makes food while I wrap presents in the kitchen. We’re going to my aunt and uncle’s house tonight, where relatives will eat the usual menu and run through the list of pre-approved questions like, “How’s school?” with the expectation of uncomplicated answers. Everyone will seem happy, or at least put on a good enough show, and then go home. And it will happen just the same the following year, and the following, and the following, just like last year, and the last, and the last.

I stand up from the table. “I’m going for a run,” I say. It’s below freezing and the sky is laden with the promise of a white Christmas. I take off up the hill past St. James Church, under whose shadow I spent my childhood. I turn right and climb another incline, head along a back road through the trees. I’m not a slow runner, but I find I can’t get away fast enough. I tear up yet another hill and my glasses are slowing me down now so I rip them off and hold them in a fist as I pump until the ice air does my lungs in. I die to keep going. I scream. I think I do, anyway. But the quiet that hovers around winter holidays here is undisturbed. No one is listening.

Rhode Island is me on my twenty-first birthday, when other family persuades me into letting them celebrate the occasion. (I had a feeling it wouldn’t go well.) I sit in front of a cake with my name on it as they steer the conversation toward verbal gay-bashing. A woman in The Providence Journal can’t visit her sick partner in the hospital because the couple couldn’t be legally married. They cackle and jeer, riffing on this and that. Finally I say, “I need to leave”—though no one is listening—and I carry my tender, nascent sexuality to the other room.

Rhode Island is me at 30, returning home after sixteen months, the longest I’ve ever been gone. It’s a pandemic, and like for many people, it’s been one of the most fraught and strangely holy times of my life. But there are no questions about my health or job or love or fulfillment. Instead, I’m asked about my travel: where I flew into, how I got home from the airport, what my ticket cost, whether the flight was on time. As if nothing has changed. As if a world beyond the boundaries of their state is incomprehensible.

Photo by Michael Denning on Unsplash

The flight is a portal, cutting across space and time to bring me back to a version of self that is now alien. I recognize the pinch of squishing into a shape that never fit, the itch that yearns for something more, but the rest of the “me” that I find here is no longer “me.” I have changed—but home hasn’t. And like a pet cat that can tell you’ve been scratching a stranger, people in my life sniff the scent of elsewhere on me. I’m an ex-pat, which makes me odd, an abandoner, a traitor, a blank slate for projections about other life paths and what lies over the border. To have left and come back different is an audaciousness worthy of pseudo-exile.

By leaving, I’ve said: This isn’t good enough for me. I need more; therefore, you’re settling. I think I’m better than this place, our place; better than you. It doesn’t matter that I’ve never said or suggested this. The injury happened anyway—and the hurt must be returned. Hearing I live in L.A., folks from family to strangers on the street pearl-clutch over wildfires and earthquakes and traffic and “danger,” not with an actual concern for my safety, but more a taunt that they’ll never have to worry about such things. Then, they wax rhapsodic about the wonders of home.

To some degree, their weapons work. A part of me grieves that I won’t ever have what they have. I will never fit in and find comfort there the way they do. To leave is to endure loss—and to also acknowledge what maybe never was. There’s a word for something like this in Portuguese, saudade, that describes a melancholic longing or nostalgia “for something that perhaps has not even happened… often carr[ying] an assurance that this thing you feel nostalgic for will never happen again.”

Yes, that stings right.

—

When the longing is so deep I can’t sense the bottom, I say I’m going to move back. I don’t doubt this is common among people who leave their home and miss it. Some of those people have even less access to return than I do: people who’ve moved countries or continents; people for whom our ableist built environments make travel difficult to impossible; people without my U.S. passport privilege; people who didn’t move by choice, but instead were displaced by poverty, imperialism, or climate collapse. I am fortunate to be able to consider picking up and starting over where I started.

Even as I say it, though, I know I won’t. The caverns open up far less frequently now—in part because home only has so much to do with geographic location. A longing for home is a longing for self, safety, and being seen. Sometimes, it’s for a feeling that can never be recaptured or may never have existed. In my new home, I have found what I yearned for and then some. It’s the neverending horizon, a wealth of change and multiplicity, and the spaciousness to make an enduring home within myself.

I also know there will always be a grey sky hanging low, even in sunny Los Angeles. The indefatigable olfactory memory of first fallen leaves. An ache that haunts my sinews in both love and heartbreak. I’m here, it says. Just like I’ve always been.

I’m here, even if you’re not.

—

Molly Savard is a queer writer, an ideas tramp, and reluctant to cohere. She was raised by three mail carriers in Manville, Rhode Island and lives in Los Angeles with every stray that’s shown up at her door. She was a founding editor for Shonda Rhimes’ lifestyle website, Shondaland.com, and has been published in Slate, Vice, and more. She also worked at the Dunkin’ Donuts where 116 meets Douglas Pike (second-best sandwich maker in the store) and once made Michelle Obama laugh. You can read more of her writing at mollysavard.com.

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