* Well, today is my last full day in Nashville. I leave for Chicago tomorrow and then back to Los Angeles.

* I went for several years almost completely avoiding home for many reasons… this has been a place of such hurt and misery for me in some ways, but through it all I still felt a strong sense of roots and belonging. I was always proud to be from Tennessee, and so many of my daydreams were set within the boundaries of its treelined horizons, rivers and old buildings. Despite my seemingly insurmountable problems with my family, I returned again and again to dog-eared memories of childhood when things were not so bad and we were all still together. Bluegrass music still made my heart sing, and recalled my parents singing mountain gospel songs, the only sweet splinters of the hellish hours spent in the nightmarish church in which I grew up. I could ride along the roads and streets I had grown up traveling and inhale deeply of bittersweet nostalgia.

* But as time passes and I have lived away from home for a longer and longer period of time, I find my feelings changing. The nostalgia for those childhood family moments and times full of uncomplicated hope is fading into something less, eroded by the stark reality of what exists now. Some long-held dreams must be let go, and I now find myself flipping through the faded memories of a stranger here in the town where I was born.

* I’ve been lucky enough to talk with a few of my extended family members here via phone and email. Everyone is so different… me chief among them in that department, I suppose. About myself, all I can really say is that only the outside has changed. My face finally reflects the person I’d always been in my mind. Several years older than I remember her, but it happens that way, I suppose.

* The real gift I have is the close group of friends who took in my foundling nobody self back in the early 1990′s and who continue to give me uncomplicated support. I fall asleep at Chyna’s home when I’m here, full of the delicious Southern soul food we cooked over the weekend in a houseful of laughing friends. I make a reappearance on the Nashville stage in front of the shouting audience made up of the old and the new faces. The ones who tipped and applauded and loved me until I had enough self confidence to hold my back straight and look into the eyes of stangers and family who loathed me for no reason. I am infinitely grateful for the empathy of these people, who know what it’s like to watch disgust, laughter, fear and hatred bloom on the faces of their own strangers and family, no matter what they had or hadn’t done in life. I look out from the stage, out through the spotlight at their smiles and think how strange it is that each one of them understands what it feels like to be laughed at in the street by people they don’t even know, with the support of the world behind every cruel taunt. All that knowing and thought passes through my mind in an instant as I turn and dance through my moments on the stage. Pain is universal, my problems were nothing special, and I knew I could live and grow, too, if they could all be happy in the midst of their own struggles.

* But not everyone has been my friend through this journey. As some may remember, events occurred in 1999 which left me hurt more deeply than I had ever been before.  The story has been told so many times that I rarely mention it anymore, but I haven’t talked much about the dark side of some reactions from within my own community. While most have been infinitely supportive, a hard few have spoken harshly of any smile I show even all these years later, preferring me locked in endless mourning. Some give cursory examination to the results of my work from the last few years and dismiss any success I have as ghoulish cannibalization of the tragedy. Some from my past have inexplicably betrayed me, hurt me in ways I didn’t expect with instruments of cruelty I never thought someone would wield.

* My last night of trust and untarnished hope began on stage as I competed in a pageant, a test of presentation and talent called Tennessee Entertainer of the Year 1999. It was to be my last pageant, because while I sweated and smiled under the winner’s crown on stage, my boyfriend was murdered in his sleep a short distance away. Life was changed forever that night, and I dedicated myself to securing justice, honoring my boyfriend’s memory and then getting myself back on track. The pageant, and my career as a showgirl, receded into the shadows and I have tried to move forward and be the best person I could since.

* Then, almost two years ago, someone sent me an email. And old friend from those days before the tragedy, who told me she had a video of that night, that pageant, and wanted to give me a copy. I was thrilled, though a wave of dread and memories washed over me when I thought of seeing it. I responded with a heartfelt thank you and waited for the video to arrive in the mail.

* It didn’t come. I wrote to her, and was reassured it was on it’s way. Time passed, more emails were exchanged, and still the video of that meaningful night never came. Where I hadn’t even thought of the video before, I now couldn’t get it out of mind, the promise of looking back in time to that night when he was still alive and I was happy. I sent ever more frantic emails, offering to send money for shipping costs, to trade services, to do anything to make it easier for her to walk out her door, place it in an envelope and mail this small thing to me.

* Despite sporadic responses assuring me that it would come, the video never arrived.

* I was so hurt… it was such a small thing to do, a thirty minute errand that would mean so much to me. Months passed, and then a year. I wrote, I called. I finally begged. I literally begged for her to send me this last little piece of my history. It seemed so cruel to tell me she had it, and then withhold it. As time passed, I began to lose faith that it was accident or lack of time. I began to feel like she had orchestrated a cruel psychological game, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to make me so unhappy with something so painful and close to my heart. It seemed like probably the most cruel thing anyone who knew me had ever done to me, except perhaps for the systematic rejection of my parents.

* Now, two years later, I sit here in Nashville on my last day home. My phone sits silent beside me, no answer to my days of calls to her, my offers to come to her any hour of the night or day and retrieve the video. I’ll go back to LA soon, still puzzling over why, and still incredulous as to the level of hatred that must have seethed behind her smiles all those years when we were friends. I still don’t understand. I’m jaded to the meanness of strangers. It hurts so much more that a friend would want to make me suffer.

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