Jefferson City, the capital of Missouri, caresses the south side of a gentle bend in the state’s namesake river. Its borders never expanded across the water, despite the downtown bridge heading north to eventually bigger places. No, instead there’s a swathe of open real estate and what used to be Cedar City before the flood of ‘93 washed it away. People don’t talk much about that anymore—we’ve got an airport and several businesses now blossoming from its corpse, after all.

I drive over the bridge and along the highway most days, spare a glance for the place I was born on my way to Columbia, a town made mini-metro by I-70 and 35,000 college students. I’m not one of them, but I think about transience, impermanence, the flat landscape of Cedar City’s unrecognizable remains, the embalming job which turned its bloated body into an open casket memorial for droves of gawkers who barely knew it to walk around, look down, don a manufactured smile that resemble sympathy, snake themselves among the bones to shake hands with a bedraggled man in wrinkly, borrowed clothes and pity the tiny girl stapled to his knees clutching a waterlogged plushie of formerly animal shape.

By this point the lowlands fill my rearview mirror, a red F-150 slips into the passing lane, and I realize I’m halfway across the center line, gripping the wheel like my car is about to take flight, like if I squeeze hard enough, keep it steady at eighty, I’ll get to go back, I’ll get to take the next exit to somewhere that exists forever, frozen in a moment I can belong to, a moment I can point at and say, “Yeah, I came from there.”

The F-150 thunders past, uses the shoulder to slingshot in front so close I need to brake, an arm shoots out the window, middle finger high, soaring, and the truck accelerates until it’s a distant dot. I breathe. I breathe and do not look in the rearview mirror again.

Jefferson City never expanded across the river—the floodplain is just another gateway, one with an airport and businesses and parks and people who go to bed in different zip codes, and I don’t know who can come from a place like that, so I keep driving until I reach Columbia and its pool of temporary denizens.

Robin Wilder is a non-binary emerging writer, graphic designer, and illustrator. Their work can be found in BULL and is forthcoming in Does it Have Pockets, Roi Faineant, and elsewhere. Robin was born and raised in the Missouri Rhineland and resides there still.