I-75/85 Connector: The Unseen Scar

Lyrics

It started as a rumor.
A tremor in the ground felt through the floorboards of our house.
Nineteen sixty-two. The air tasted of dust before the first brick fell.

They came with their maps and their tripod tools.
Men who didn’t live here.
Drawing lines in red chalk across Mrs. Henderson’s prize-winning roses.
A straight, clean line right through our front porch swing.
They called it progress. A river.
But a river of progress shouldn’t smell of diesel and hot tar.
It shouldn’t choke the magnolias with a fine gray powder.
My father stood by the window, watching. Said nothing.
There was nothing to say to a map.

You are the great divide.
The concrete canyon they poured through our heart.
You are the wound that never closed.
A constant hum where the quiet used to be.
They built you for the future,
but you erased our yesterday.
You are the unseen scar.

The pile drivers pounded from sunup to sundown.
Shook the pictures right off the walls.
We watched them tear down the Williams’ place,
then the bakery on the corner.
Piece by piece, the world got smaller.
Then the great gray walls went up, higher than the church steeple.
Casting a permanent shadow at three in the afternoon.
My own street just… ended.
It hit a wall of concrete and noise.

You are the great divide.
The concrete canyon they poured through our heart.
You are the wound that never closed.
A constant hum where the quiet used to be.
They built you for the future,
but you erased our yesterday.
You are the unseen scar.

Now I stand at the overpass.
The wind from the cars feels cold.
I can see the roof of my cousin’s house. A five-minute walk, once.
Now it’s a different country over there.
Separated by six lanes of people going somewhere else.
They don’t see us down here, in the shadow you made.
They just see the road ahead.

They called it the Connector.
Funny name.
For something that broke everything apart.
A scar.
You don’t just heal from a scar.
You just learn to live on one side of it.