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Wow that post is still going around huh

One time I was playing outside and grandpa came out with a shotgun and told me to get inside immediately, his eyes trained on the forest line at the edge of property

I was told it was a bobcat, and grandpa handed me a used shotgun shell. the funny thing is, I never heard him fire the gun

There's only one other instance I can think of where we were driving four-wheelers/atv through a more marshy area in the woods, and the one me and my sister were on got stuck on the mud

There was always a specific spot where anything mechanical would shut down. Cars would stall and a four wheeler would cut off 

 A graveyard that didn’t belong to our family sat beside the home. We don’t know the names on the gravestones 

 There was a skeleton in the forest. We don’t know who passed there 

 A home at the beginning of the road burned down but the chimney remained. I swear we could see smoke coming from it sometimes 

 There were figures in the wheat fields sometimes but they were too far away to see. Grandpa said they were neighbors and we should never talk to them 

 My great grandmas house sits next to my grandpa’s, abandoned, and we were told to never go in there 

You are new to town, many people greet you. They already know everything about you. You've never met them.

Everyone has similar names to each other. However, they're all different by at least one letter. You ask people about this. They become angry and don't tell you.

You walk into a drug store. The items on the shelves are coated in light dust. They look like they are from the 50s. No one has bought them. No one ever has.

Life and death walk hand in hand. A bird makes a nest out of a skull. Mushrooms grow on rotting silage. A wild animal dies, grubs fill it, those grubs are fed to baby skunks and chicks. Disturbing and Beautiful.

You find the corpse of a possum one day while cleaning out corn stalk in a shed. It's a perfectly normal thing to find. Until you notice that only the head is missing-and it hasn't been dead too long.

(from someone who actually moved to a small town)

Businesses keep opening and closing on main street within a year. Other stay in business for hundreds of years. They always have, but the rest perish.

Somehow the town looks as though it has never changed. But it has, hasn't it? People have cell phones and modern technology now. You look back at old newspapers for a project. You see that there are people long since dead with the exact same names as the living. All the names of one generation together.

Only city people are afraid of the corn. The small communities know everything that is in there. It's the cities that people are afraid of. That's where people die.

On some afternoons you see fancy cars pull up in front of a small door between shops on main street. Old men with jewelry get out, whisper to each other, and all go into the door. Perhaps they are Masons? Or something else. No one knows about their meetings. No one talks about it.

• ‌"We all fight our own private wars."

• ‌"Scars. A sign that you had been hurt. A sign that you had healed."

• ‌"Things don’t just go away because we want them to."

• ‌"Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing."

• ‌"Pain wasn’t so bad"

• ‌"Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer morning could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder."

• ‌"Her eyes were like the night sky in the desert. It felt like there was a whole world living inside her. I didn’t know anything about that world."

• ‌"Everyone was always becoming someone else."

• ‌"I bet you could find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand."

• ‌"Words were different when they lived inside of you."

• ‌"There are some words I'll never learn to spell."

• "I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get."

• "I had a feeling there was something wrong with me. I guess I was a mystery even to myself."

• "The problem with my life was that it was someone else's idea."

• "But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry."

• "And it seemed to me that Dante's face was a map of the world. A world without any darkness. Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that?"