caves.

The longest cave system in Maine can be found inside my parents’ house. It starts in the kitchen, rolls around through my childhood bedroom, sinks into the first floor and from there into the earth. It is surrounded by trees. It is beautiful. It is quiet. It is cold.

I’m traveling there now, still on the highway, still in the sunlight. Still warm. I roll the window down just an inch, stick my hand out into air that, when still, is suffocating in its heat. Whipping by me in the left lane, however, it’s a weft of warm and less-warm and almost cool––almost, but not quite––running through my fingertips.

We’re ten miles from the Hampton tolls, thirty from home. Not that we’re counting. Not that I’m with anyone. I dial up my music a notch, Noah Kahan reminding me where my anxiety comes from, feeling safer acknowledging it when it’s something I can sing along to.

I’m mean because I grew up in New England.

It’s a residual thing. It’s a thing of the blood. Of the bones.

It’s a thing that sticks with you and, no matter how long you’re away, a thing that resurfaces when the tolls come into focus, when the E-ZPass blinks you in, when you reluctantly turn off the GPS because you didn’t really need it in the first place, but now you can’t pretend anymore; when you’ve crossed the border and a green sign tells you that now you’re home. This is where life is as it should be.

Don’t you forget it.

The longest cave system in Maine has been painted green to match the trees. It looks like camouflage, I think, driving up. I think maybe I wouldn’t have known it was there if I hadn’t known it was there. I think maybe I would have only recognized the dead-end of the road and turned around, wondering why I turned the GPS off; wondering why I thought I knew where I was going.

My dad is standing at the end of the street, next to the yard, a pushbroom in his hand. Maine Gothic. He’s just finished sealing the driveway––I feel like, for some reason, that he’s always just finished sealing the driveway when I come to visit. It’s one of those things that exists here: a constant state of renewal. A déjà vu.

I roll down my window. Stop. Where should I park? And he waves me speechlessly into the turnaround, a place that, when I was little, was reserved exclusively for guests and loud distant relatives who didn’t know any better and really didn’t care. I put the car where I am told and find he has already gone back into the house. Ghost.

“You can move it into the driveway later,” he says when I finally get to the front door which is really the back door which always confuses visitors. I have the sense that I am auditioning to belong here. I am a changeling come to steal the memory of their child.

“Oh! It’s you!” my mother says when she sees me. Like I came from the air. Like I emerged from the walls.

“It’s me,” I say and hug her.

The longest cave system in Maine is cold all months out of the year.

“I’m sorry it’s so hot in here,” Mum says.

I shrug on the sweater I keep stowed in the back room.

The caverns are vast, in the longest cave system in Maine. The tunnels run deep and are dark on even the brightest mornings. From the trees. From the air. There are lights on in the middle of the day. I track through rooms by memory more than by sight.

I stub my toe on the leg of a table that wasn’t here the last time I was.

“Isn’t it nice?”

Inside my sock, my toe begins to bleed.

There’s not much to do, in the longest cave system in Maine. I used to like this, I catch myself thinking as CNN runs in an empty room. Jake Tapper fills the shadows in on the latest from the RNC. Another potential shooter arrested in Milwaukee. Flooding at Drake’s Toronto mansion. Amazon’s best deals on air purifiers.

I used to play pretend with the shadows on the walls. I used to be a witch and dance with acorns in the trees. I used to sing at the top of my lungs and listen to the echoes like a chorus.

At night, it rains like it hasn’t rained in a long time. A good summer rain. A rain that could flood the caves, if it really wanted to. We sit on the deck and listen to the rain, watch for bats. Watch for fireflies. We sit in the dark that isn’t so different from being inside. A candle flickers in the middle of the table, and I watch the shadows on the ceiling, on the screens that keep the outside out. I watch the shadows play over my father’s face, my mother’s, as the rain comes down harder. As the lighting creeps closer. As the thunder rolls like a heartbeat overhead. As my mother announces she’s going to take a shower, and then she’s going to bed. A renewal. A déjà vu.

I watch them as my father reminds me where the light switches are downstairs. As he tells me I can turn a fan on if I’m warm. As he apologizes for not having coffee for me in the morning. As he asks if I want to take strawberries home with me tomorrow. As he finally goes in to bed too, and I stay, watching the shadows.

Watching the lightning.

Listening to the rain.