Failures in Existential Homecomings

I went home for Thanksgiving this year. It was wonderful. It was weird. It was interesting.

Home is a strange concept for me, given that I don't really have one. Not in a tragic way, of course, but in a way that makes 'the Holidays' somewhat emotionally complicated. Especially as I get older and messier. And wiser. (Somewhat wiser.)

Amherst is one home, certainly, It's where I grew up, the place that exists in a dozen dimensions stacked on each other, perspectives of my world at 8, 12, 16, 20, 25, 30...But I've left, and my brother's left, and our parents left. So it's still home, in a way, still the place I started, but all my time there is woven through with this faint, constant anxiety. It's a whimpering, underlying loneliness, a mild love panic - whatever it means, it's a specific kind of emptiness that I don't feel anywhere else: This was home. But I have to leave soon. This is not my base anymore.

Every place has had it's moments. In New Orleans, I felt like a kindred with an entire city, its whole spirit, like everything strange and terrible that I was was true, and real, but also beautiful and fascinating, and that all that twisted chaos was probably just fine.

Then Boston, the strange little second adolescence I threw myself into because I apparently never tire of late nights and melodrama, excessive introspection and cheap wine, skating along the poverty line between champagne brunches. And I love it there still, I have family by blood, and families we made up just with our hearts, and being back there is the best mirror, of how much has changed and how much is the same and how much we can love each other, and how much of that is forever. But it's not home anymore, either. There's no place that is just mine, all the way through.

My parents live in Florida, my brother lives in Colorado. When I'm with them, I'm home, because that's my team, but underneath all the best parts is the same low-level hum that buzzes through the base of my brain when I'm in Amherst: This was home. But I have to leave soon. There's nothing permanent for me here.

I used to hate the expression 'Home Is Where the Heart Is', because fuck you, my heart is everywhere.

Baylor and I got back late last night, to an empty apartment that smelled like roses and sandalwood from the incense burning when Kyle picked us up on Wednesday. I spent half an hour in the shower steaming the car-ride stiffness out of my muscles and rubbing my sides where they were still sore from the night before, when F and I stayed up belly-laughing over a decade's worth of memories, photos and videos capturing hundreds of stupid, tiny, wonderful moments, dozens we'd forgotten about, all of them we were so happy to have remembered. And it occurred to me that was home, too, inside those images were my parents, and my brother, my friends, place we've been, things we've seen, the people we were, a whole record that doesn't register any less deeply simply because it's not a physical place.

Earlier that day, I sat in the basement of Bartlett Hall with two of my favorite people on the planet, people I didn't get to meet until well into my Boston days. One of them is at UMass now, teaching classes in the building where I spent days of my undergraduate life, books spread out across beat up wooden desks tucked into the second floor landing, baking in the greenhouse heat cooked up by window panes and winter sunlight. I hadn't been inside in the better part of a decade, but here I was again, for the simple reason that two of my worlds happened to bump into each other on the same day. There was a time when that would have upset me greatly, a time when I favored strict compartmentalization to all other life-love organizational systems, but I'm not really like that anymore. Now I like it when my edges blur.

This ended differently than I intended. This morning, I thought I was going to write about how I sort of understand some things that terrify me - commitment, responsibility, regularity, maturity - much better when I think about them in the context of Home. Someplace to go back to. Some place that is all yours. But it was going to be something of a backhanded compliment, and I don't want to do that now. Now I just want to say that I think maybe we spend our whole lives coming home, and that's not nearly as depressing as it sounds. It gives us something to aspire to.

When I got out of the shower last night, I put on an old Temptation's album I stole from my brother and emailed my parents to let them know we got back safely, albeit without my phone charger (hence the email). Baylor was passed out beside me, purring in that way unique to Staffies, exhausted in that way unique to small children and animals after long days of travelling. When I got into bed, that humming was still there, the one that never lets me forget that this good thing will end, too. They all will! But maybe that's not the best way to think about it.

That hum tells us that things will pass, yes. But it's sure there a lot. So maybe it's not there to bum me out. Maybe it's there to keep my eyes open. Like an appreciation alert. Like there are too many good things wherever I go, and I'm never going to get to them all. And that's probably just fine.