Cuyahoga Falls: A Short Story

Cuyahoga Falls is a modest suburb, home to 49,000 (93 percent of which are white).

Ten, or so, main roads divide the northeast Ohioan town. Less trafficked roads with small and moderately sized homes branch off of these primary arteries. Then, there are the roads, the ones that are the side streets of the side streets, that hide within, tucked away from the busier activity of everyday life. Here, all commotion – the vrooming of cars, the roaring of trains, the blaring of Friday night high school football games – is muffled. And when inside a home, the muffles shrink to whispers. For the first sixteen years of my life, this has been my home: a town where I can comfortably go to sleep and awake the next morning knowing exactly what is to happen.

departure time could not come soon enough. It was a typical summer afternoon in northeast Ohio: humid, with blazingly exhausting rays. Two hours prior to liftoff, my mom and I arrived at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. As one could imagine, the international airport bustled with bridled chaos. Returnees, departees, eaters, talkers, sleepers, walkers, business executives, photographing tourists, Americans, Europeans, and Asians occupied every inch of space. Hurriedly mobile suitcases made for tricky traveling. With two hours until departure, my mom and I traversed the labyrinthine expanse. My journey to the plane began at Frontier Airline’s baggage check-in. I placed my stuffed suitcase onto a scale to verify its weight was less than fifty pounds. All the while, a polite African-American man wearing a green Frontier Airline polo clicked away at a screen, confirming my ticket information. In exchange for my luggage, the Frontier Airline employee handed me my boarding pass. Next, I needed to pass through the four security checkpoints; the first guarded the subway that transported me to Gate B; the second scanned me and my belongings, and verified my boarding pass; the third, as if it disregarded the second checkpoint, rescanned my possessions and myself; and the fourth, just to be triply certain, screened my entire body and my carry-on. After this forty-five-minute process, I located my two cousins and their parents, and proceeded