I've Never Been There

I am talking to this woman and I tell her I grew up in Detroit. I've never been there, she says. I wonder if she is thinking that Detroit is some place, some real place where you can go and walk around and see things and note all the interesting places you want to tell the people back home about. I saw a tire, a giant tire, right there by the freeway, looking like it was going to roll right into the cars going by. It was the craziest thing. How could this woman or anyone else know that Detroit is not some place, another stop along the way? How could she know about the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is? Or how the nothing that is rolls out from no center towards no horizon, moving too slowly to allow you to see how things are different now, stuck, instead, thinking it had always been this way.  Where are the people who once lived in the houses that no longer remain? Did anyone ever rise here and go to work and come back in the evening? Was it ever so? How strange to be stuck, frozen in place, between going and gone.

Detroit? I've never been there.