i fancy this the beginning to my book, my story

Peru, Indiana is where I was born and raised. A tiny town between a highway and a river, where there is nothing to do, nowhere to go... Peru is like an old lover you haven’t thought of – they were pushed somewhere back in your mind into the pockets of forgetfulness and then one day spring forth with a sharp, stabbing pain of remembrance, and you wonder how you could forget something this painful, and even more so, you’re confused as to why someone so forgotten could ever hurt you this profoundly to begin with.
No matter how long or how many miles I put between us, I couldn’t completely leave Peru behind. Something would always trigger it to resurface, to draw me back in. And when I would let myself dwell on Peru, these were the things I would always remember: Peru, the self proclaimed Circus Capital of the World, where once a year boys and girls swing on a trapeze and do cartwheels and people crawl out to fill the streets, eating cotton candy and greasy funnel cakes and riding the Ferris wheel they set up by the courthouse. Vacant teenagers in baggy jeans clog the alleys waiting to mug younger kids with bigger allowances. They kick away on their skateboards and spend the dough on packs of cigarettes and pop rocks. On Broadway by the railroad tracks, there’s one old man who is always chewing tobacco and waving at the passing cars. He wears a baseball hat that says "Joe," and that’s what everyone calls him, though no one knows for sure if that is his name or really cares. On the corner of Main and Fremont right downtown, a family named Patel who came from India to escape one rusted cage, only to fly into another one, runs a motel called the Shelton. The florescent pink sign that flashes down on the streets at night is missing its first two letters, so it just says "Shelton Tel." They run that motel to send their smart mathematician sons to college for a good American opportunity. All the cops with nothing more to do than bust teenage parties and give out the monthly quota of tickets, while conveniently ignoring the meth labs that provide the town fix in church basements and old VW vans. The mayor only cracks down on it when a van explodes into the side of Lo Bill’s grocery store and kills some little boy named Tim Walker. Outside of the city limits, there is a dam and a reservoir that was built to stop the regular flooding of the Wabash River where people live on shitty houseboats and shoot illegal fireworks off the decks. Everybody goes fishing out there during the summer for wide mouthed carp in the muddy toilet bowl that is man made Lake Mississinewa. Everything is fields and forests, stretching out for miles around the highway where cars zoom past it all. You’ve probably driven past it sometime on your way to Florida or California, never knowing. The countryside is littered with broken down covered bridges where my friends and I used to hide on Saturday nights, smoking and drinking and building our campfires to tell stories around. There was a feeling then that this was a world unto itself, the only complete universe we knew. But if you don’t leave right away, you never will. You will find yourself settling, that wondering inside of you slowly dying until you don’t care about what is outside. 3 miles of city blocks with 46 churches and almost as many bars rubbing out all the dreams and schemes hatched about becoming astronauts and being movie stars, of moving to places far away and living in mansions by the ocean. This is where I left.