Exile

It was a Saturday night when I was home for the weekend. I was meeting some friends to hang out for the night. The night started out innocently enough. We had decided to go to Danville, a small city near by as we had done thousands of times in the past. As we arrived in Danville, one of my friends called and asked to meet him in one of the "rougher" parts of town. After consulting the rest of the group, we decided to meet him. The next thing you know, we are in a bad part of the town where there is a lot of violence and drugs everywhere and at someone's house we didn't know. The feeling I had was strange...a feeling of misplacement and exclusion. Although I was with a group of friends, we ended up at a strange house filled with people we didn't know; people we had no idea of what they were going to do. I will never forget this feeling. I have at times felt like I "didn't fit in", but I had never felt anything like this. This was the feeling of exile...the feeling that you are so far removed from what you are used to, you become a complete outsider.