The Ones Who Stayed
Small towns wear their name for good reason. Every stereotype about them is true. Everyone knows everyone. The inbreeding statistics are higher than you’d want. The newspaper covers the gardening club’s seventy-fifth anniversary and kids placing third in the regional taekwondo competition. That exotic stuff. And when you live somewhere like that, eventually you face the question: stay or go?
Mine was Buchloe. Bavaria, somewhere between Augsburg and Landsberg and Kaufbeuren—places that probably don’t mean much to you. And when it was almost too late, I decided to leave. Berlin. To make something different happen, something that wasn’t marrying my girlfriend and moving into a house on her father’s land and dutifully making FC Bayern fans. That kind of different life wasn’t really acceptable where I was from.
When I visit home now at Christmas or Easter, I feel superior. Like I left the blue-and-white monotony for something faster, something with parties and drugs and minor TV celebrities. Or you’re at home beating off because you’re living at the center of German power, next to the TV tower and some guy screaming dialect through the streets. That’s the fantasy anyway.
There are real reasons I wanted out. Money. Variety. A future that wasn’t predetermined. You know, big city life or whatever. And most days I don’t have time to imagine what I’d be doing if I’d stayed, if I’d never left almost five years ago. Everyone asks themselves that question at some point. It just has a way of finding you.
Late night, alone with wine, scrolling Facebook, looking at the faces of people who decided to stay—or who maybe just didn’t have the energy to leave. They look older now. Heavier. But they’re laughing and drinking and they don’t seem to regret not moving thousands of kilometers away chasing something better, risking coming back with nothing. They work their eight-hour days at the convenience store or nursing home, get excited about the McDonald’s twenty kilometers away, meet up every night at their regular bar. Or when they want things to get wilder they drive to the big nightclub a few towns over, dance to David Guetta, cheer for The Bachelor—because that’s what they know from TV.
I miss them sometimes. Sure, they’re posting daily inspirational quotes and inviting you to pointless Facebook apps, sharing photos of tortured dogs with I’ll cut off his dick if I ever catch him!!
underneath—that’s Bavaria. But then the nostalgia hits and you remember: getting wasted on Jägermeister with them in the warm summer rain outside one of those wooden sheds with Groove Coverage blasting. Breaking into a camper van and getting our asses kicked by the owners, then reading about ourselves as vandals in the newspaper the next morning. Sitting with Jule on the wooden bench by the creek after midnight, and she leans into my lap to show me shooting stars, and we make out.
It’s depressing sometimes, knowing they’re still together after all these years, still doing things as a group, some of them couples now, married, with kids. We were dumb kids with nothing in our heads, causing trouble everywhere we could find—streets, fields, schools, forests, lakes, apartments, bars, basements, rooms, beds. And they stayed together. I left. Far away. Four in the morning, wine in hand, that feels sad.
Even though I know the answers, I ask myself anyway before I can sleep. Was it really that bad there? Was any of this worth abandoning my friends? What would I be doing now if I’d stayed? Pizza delivery? Warehouse work? Unemployment?
In another world I’m sitting in Buchloe right now wondering what would’ve happened if I’d had the guts to leave. Then I open the newspaper. The gardening club is having their seventy-fifth anniversary. The kids got third place in the regional tournament. Exotic stuff and all.