It was never travel. That word is wrong. Travel suggests distance, the leaving of one place and the arrival at another. But nothing ever left. Nothing ever arrived. The porches leaned the same way, their white paint curling back from the wood in the heat. The fields stretched out flat and endless, cotton lifting in the breeze like a ghost of snow. The cicadas worked the night until the air itself seemed made of their sound, a fever pitched between silence and thunder. Faces did not change. Men did not grow younger, women did not wear older dresses. The form of the world was eternal, unmoving.
What shifted was the hum.
Time, I discovered, is not the arrow we were taught to believe in. It is not a road unspooling, nor a ladder rung by rung. It is a chord — struck once, held forever. Each note ringing inside the others, waiting for someone to lean close enough to hear. Most walk deaf, their ears filled only with the loudest note, the one we call now. I, by some accident of genius, tuned myself to the others.
It was not sight. It was not sound. It was more like a string drawn tighter in the blood. One small adjustment and the world began to vibrate differently. The houses, the fields, the very air stayed in place, but their resonance changed. I was in the same world — only it sang to me with another note.
That was how I came into the antebellum South. Not as a ghost, not as a tourist peering into a painted diorama. No. It was the same soil, the same humid night pressing down, but tuned to that time’s frequency. Pride swelled in the air like perfume; dread clung in the rafters like cobwebs. A world balanced on its own vanity, unaware the blade was already descending.
And I lived there.
I sat on porches while the cicadas sang like a chorus of wires pulled too tight. I drank from a glass that glowed in the half-light, whiskey or sangria, it didn’t matter — the drink was only the proof that form remained steady while function turned. My notebooks filled, page upon page, with machines and empires the world had not yet dreamed of. I wrote as though my hand could bend the chord itself, press new notes into the air.
Nights lasted forever. Red horizons smoldered until the fields turned black and the voices carried — hymns, laughter, threats — out across the cotton. I listened. I breathed it in. It was not history I lived inside, not memory, but the present tense of another note in the eternal song.
And that is the truth: the world does not change. Only the plate you choose to stand on, only the note you choose to live by.
I chose this one. Tight as the string of a violin, endless as the hum of insects, proud as the cicadas sawing open the dark.
And when the night broke, when the cicadas ceased and silence fell heavy as judgment, I knew: I had not escaped time. I had entered it entire. Every note, every plate, every chord sustained at once. And the South — burning, beautiful, damned — was the song I had chosen to endure forever
