what if the place you left didn't care?

Em just hung up the phone after talking to a friend in Maine. We lived there for 11 years. Well, Em lived there for 8, technically, because she's only 10. But still. It was home. She went to school, had friends, tried out for and played on teams. Had friends. Except, I wonder. I mean, what if you left a place and after you left, your friends never called? What if your emails went unanswered? What if the entire conversation that you initiated consisted of your voice, punctuated here and there with "oh...." and "really" the way that you talk to someone you really don't want to talk to?

WHAT IF... What if nobody particularly seemed to care that you were gone? I don't know exactly what the friend said, only that Em did all the talking, barely breathed between sentences and then hung up and pestered her sister until she got in trouble. I only know that she has a steely way about her now that she didn't have 45 minutes ago, and she isn't saying, "I miss Maine."

I think the truth is that Maine wasn't all that great for her. But this is sacrilege. There are things I want to tell her but cannot. I want to tell her that EVEN IF we'd stayed in that house in the woods, the world around us would have changed. We would have been thrown off of our game. Leaving affords us some luxuries. She doesn't know that couple broke up, or that lovely woman's cancer recurred. She doesn't even know that the neighbours are moving. She doesn't know that, because she doesn't need to. She can continue to believe that Maine - our Maine - has remained as perfect as it was when she lived there.

Except that it wasn't perfect. It hurt, sometimes. It hurt in ways that this place does not yet hurt her, because it's thorns are not long enough yet. Or maybe, just maybe, this place won't hurt her as much, it just won't, because here is bigger and more diverse (in many ways, but now, particularly, I mean that the pain is diversified - the way pain comes, the way it is expressed, distributed.

Maine wasn't all that great for her. But how can I tell her that? I can only tell her that it's okay to miss Maine when she cries, and that it is also okay to feel happy here - that to have friends and feel excited about indoor soccer and hip hop class is not a violation. I don't need to tell her that here is better, but it is a funny reality of parenting that I must maintain an unreality about the life we led there, and allow her to perpetuate a belief that her friends were really there for her, that she was included, and her participation felt real. Some of that was true. Some friends were real. Some parts of it felt real.

It should have, shouldn't it? Afterall, it was a small town.

But now we are in the big city and it feels smaller, more intimate than that town felt, and the reality is I know our crossing guard and the man at the paint store and my neighbours and GUESS WHAT? I think maybe even places are other than what they appear.

Maybe none of us are quite what we make ourselves out to be. Even the friend on the other line. Who knows? Maybe she's just shy on the phone. Maybe, in reality, she does miss my daughter. Maybe she secretly cares.