Going home for me is like stepping back in time. It is as if everything I left behind waits for the opportunity to spring at me as soon as I dare venture back. The house even smells the same, a sort of musk that never goes away. My family even looks the same, and it seems their mannerisms will never fade. My brother still makes the same jokes, my father still tells the same stories, and my mother still makes the same faces. I feel as if I even pick up the same conversation I started six months ago, not missing a beat. At times I feel the need to shake an eight inch layer of dust from everything.
The consistency may seem to be comforting, but it keeps all of my fears, insecurities, and bad memories captive, trapped in this replica of another era. All I want in life is to move forward, but every time I come home I feel a pull to the past, as if to remind me that I will never escape what happended then. As I drive the same roads I once traveled, stop at the same restaurants, I can't breathe. I am fifteen here, and will never allude the grips of awkwardness or acne. I wonder if other people can see it on my face, this "betweeness" that consumes me. I wonder if everyone feels this way when they go back, or if I have some kind of complex.
They say that home is where the heart is. This makes a lot of sense to me. Maybe it is not home that hasn't changed, but me. Maybe every time I come here I stifle myself into believing that I can't move on. Part of me isn't ready to grow up, so I get caught up in what used to be. Home is where my heart is, and I didn't want to leave home so I left my heart instead.
This time will be different. It has to be. When I pack at the last possible minute, I have to make sure to toss my heart in with my phone charger. That way I can unpack, organize, and have a pulse again.
2 comments:
for me, it was a gradual change. when i first came to college, and for much of the first year, i found myself going home as much as i could and when i was there, still being consumed by the bad memories and the hard times i had experienced there. then, somehow, over my four years away from home and here at college, something changed. now, when i go home i DO find comfort in the things that have never and will never change. and even better, i have this new confidence to try and change the things that need to change. i can finally tell my momma that she is too hard on the rest of us. i can finally tell my daddy that he is too apathetic. i can finally tell my brother that i am proud of who he has become and that i love him. i can finally do all the things i could not do when i lived there. now, i am not just a daughter and a sister and a child. i am a family member and a woman and someone who is worth listening to.
bright eyes,
you will have a new home someday, one of your own, to fill with just as lasting memories, but at your designe. Hope in your future.
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