I wrote a poem a while ago about searching for home. It was published today on Dimly Lit for anyone who would like to read it. My secret is that it’s not really finished yet. It can’t be because I haven’t found home and that’s what this poem is about—not knowing where you are supposed to be. It’s not all terrible because I’ve found home in many places, and I will find it again. You have to open yourself up to the possibility of finding it or otherwise you might lose yourself looking for nothing.
Home is defined as a permanent place, but I don’t think I’ve ever lived somewhere permanently. As a kid I wanted to leave my mother’s house, and now I want to go back to my mother’s house just in different circumstances. At night, when I can’t sleep, I trace the hallways in my mind so that I don’t forget where to open my bedroom door.
My college friend, Juni, once shared a undergrad paper they wrote about family. They sent it to me because part of it was about me, and part of it was about their grandma using a box mix to make apple pancakes.
I’ll share the last part, with permission.
“Family means a lot to some and less to others but I’m pretty sure it has to mean something to everyone. My grandmother would make apple pancakes for us, and even though it’s the same box mix, hers always turned out better than when I try to make them. Maybe the apples need to be fresher, or a specific variety, or it’s important to use depression tactics like thinning milk with water. I know you have to grate the apples straight into the batter.
My best friend last year was a lesbian who collected rocks and had an instrument I had never heard of – the dulcimer – and a big fluffy cat who liked to pee on the couch even after they got a new one because the last one had been peed on too many times. I don’t know who Minnow lives with now, or if they renamed him, but JoJo is my family even if she moved to Oregon and bleached her hair and moved again so I don’t know where she lives.
I walked by her old house today and the new occupants were sitting on the sidewalk smoking a bowl of weed when there was a perfectly good porch to smoke weed on right there. Or maybe they didn’t live in that house. I would have lived in that house. I fell in love immediately with the vacant attic room, with its tiny door and leading hallway (the gay-llery, they called it, for the pictures pinned along its walls). The roof came down on either side so it wasn’t quite a square, and the entire back wall was blackboard, various notes and root vegetables from the previous occupant. And you could step straight onto the back porch’s roof from the window, another smoking spot, and it felt the right size and the right environment – to live with lesbians instead of men.
Frosty said no, even after everything, so I got an on-campus apartment with a bigger bedroom, a cat, and no smoke spot. It wouldn’t be fair to make an exception, they said. Your mental health might be bad, but not quite bad enough. Are you sure this is covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act? Because it seems like you’re making this up.
JoJo once told me she hasn’t felt like any bed was hers in so long, and the bed that once felt like hers can’t anymore because she grew up, and her family isn’t one unit, and I don’t know if they still have that house. You can’t go to a family and say “excuse me, can I come in, I slept in the first bedroom on the left for my whole childhood and I just need some real rest.” I never put this together with the fact that I have had nine separate bedrooms in college, but there it is. My beds always feel like mine, but only recently have I been able to get consistent, healthy sleep. Maybe it’s the cat, maybe it’s living with my partner. Either way, I think we need family. ”
Juni wrote it a few years back while we were in undergrad. They used to write papers and title them things such as Catullus, Reborn in Pink Spandex. Now Juni lives in Chicago with their partner and I live in Oregon without my partner.
It’s quite an odd thing to read something written about you, from someone you know well. It’s like looking at yourself, across the room, in a different body, not reversed through a mirror.
I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions recently and one of them is why do I keep returning back to the west coast if all of my friends are somewhere else. I kind of feel like the kid in The Incredibles who, when Mr. Incredible asks what he’s waiting for says, I don’t know! Something amazing, I guess.
I finished the first Karl Ove book in the long haul of novels about his life. I know. He’s a far from perfect guy—but I write a lot about my life, so I imagined there was something to gain or at least something interesting. Knausgård wrote in the beginning of the first book that up until moving to Stockhold he felt as if, “…there was a continuity to my life.” He wrote, “As if it stretched unbroken from childhood up to the present, held together by new connections, in a complex and ingenious pattern in which every phenomenon I saw was capable of evoking a memory which unleashed small landslides of feeling in me, some with a known source, others without. The people I encountered came from towns I had been to, they knew other people I had met, it was a network, and it was a tight mesh. But when I moved to Stockholm this flaring up of memories became rarer and rarer, and one day it ceased altogether. That is, I could still remember; what happened was that the memories no longer stirred anything in me. No longing, no wish to return, nothing. Just the memory, and a barely perceptible hint of an aversion to anything that was connected with it.”
I think that last part is a bit of an answer to why I don’t return home. Of course, of course. Because I am me, and I am nostalgic, and I miss things. I am not Karl Ove Knausgård, thank god. I’ll always miss home, and all the places that have been home, wherever I go. I might never open my bedroom door again, even though I still know where it is. So I have to keep going for now and miss it all the same.
Right now I’m in the liminal again, waiting for something. I’m sitting in a home that is not mine and watching a dog that is not named Trout. And when I’m not waiting for anything amazing, I’ll turn right around.
…
Picture taken by my love, in a place that I do not call home, but I felt at home anyway.