April 29, 2022The conception of home has miscarried in me. To be honest, I’m not sure it ever existed at all.
The idolization of anywhere outside my parent’s house has been loud and concrete for as long as I can remember. Not just their house; the zip code, the politics, the people we shared grocery store lines with. I’ve always known what I don’t want. And somehow, now the list is adjoining what I do.
I was home for Christmas this year and it was seventy degrees and humid. East Texas specializes in clichés. My mother and father went to high school together. Their only and closest friends are integral parts of my upbringing. (*I think the word friend is an interesting one. By definition it means “a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection”. Mutual. It’s interesting that we throw the word around in non-exclusivity. English is a lazy language.) Their laughs and stories and photos remind me of whatever feeling I think is supposed to be elicited by the mention of home.
Sitting in their living room, which could be mistaken for a taxidermy’s office, my Dad’s best friend brought up something about his Mother. She had passed away recently and suffered the relics of dementia. Him and his wife and my Dad and my Mom circled the conversation with memories. Good ones. Ones worthy of laughter and comradery and trust. For the first time in my life I felt like an adult in the room, let in on the joke. But this wasn’t a joke. The laughter was a salve for crying I know the four of them didn’t do front of one another except maybe at the burial. I never thought that I’d say to myself,
“I want that.”
My community of artists and misfits and sages and everything other than normal did not do such small talk. Did not and has never done light subject banter or insertions about the weather or anything other than existentialism. I realized that I fled this place and these people as soon as I could press a pedal. And yet in that brown-carpeted room on Christmas night with the people who raised me and kept saying “come back”– I felt a desire to oblige.
There’s a certain comfort in denial. Saying no to something bigger means saying yes to something familiar. It’s funny to me that familiar sounds a lot like family.
I left Los Angeles because I couldn’t eat or sleep in the same place of those whose marrow was derived of envy and sex and bright strobes of empty sound. I am in Denver living in the basement of my blood Aunt and Uncle by sheer generosity. People I never asked for anything from, yet was given multitudes of mercy and kindness. Family was on the list of “Don’t Wants” (in the traditional sense; the nuclear sense)– but now it is changing. I want to allow my cage door to be unlocked. But is it ok to close it when it gets dark out? Is there something to say about being a non-prodigal son who can come and go? Is there a way to be grounded and cageless? Is there really an answer to question or just a truth to swallow?
I don’t know.
But I think I’m going to let myself write it down.