When I was little, I’d get homesick at home. My parents didn’t know what to do with me. They’d tell me I am home, ask me what’s really wrong, sigh that they don’t know what to say, and eventually leave me to cry it out in my room. At the time, I didn’t know how else to describe the pit in my stomach, this desperate, aching, longing for something I couldn’t name, something I already had. I still don’t, really.
I lived all of my remembered life in a house on Hood Place, a quiet street in a residential town just beneath Nashville. When I think of it, the first thing that comes to mind are the old beige rugs full of dust and dog fur. I remember spending afternoons rolling around on the game room floor in mind numbing boredom. I remember crawling beneath my bed and staring up at the wooden slats above me, running my fingers through the rough strands of carpet and wondering if I’d ever escape.
It took us almost a year to sell our house. End of senior year, right after graduation, was when we listed it. This was also right when the Nashville housing market crashed. So, we waited, and waited, and waited. In the meantime, we continued renovations. My mother cried when the painters began slowly turning every beige wall a sterile gray. So, she and I packed our things and drove to Metuchen, New Jersey to stay with my grandmother. Her, so she didn’t have to watch the home she’d raised her children in slowly become unrecognizable, and I, so that I could get out of the cloying heat of Tennessee summer, sticking to your skin like a bad memory.
When I left Tennessee, I never looked back. Sometimes it’s hard to remember picking bouquets of dandelions for my mother in the front yard, or the smell of chlorine and the sweet burn of sunlight, the cool blue water below my pool float. It’s easier to pretend my childhood home was horrible. That way I can keep the demons all in one place. That way, I can pretend I left them behind.
According to google, there are two definitions of home. One is “the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.” But what does it mean to live in a space? Must it contain the overarching majority of your happiest moments: holiday music and ceramic villages, dice collections and dragon figurines. Or is it where you sleep at night, kept up by thoughts that twist and turn, divide and conquer?
In freshman year of highschool, my best friend was sent to the psych ward. I spent almost every day after school visiting her, and she toured me through rooms where you couldn’t close bathroom doors and shampoo was deemed a deadly weapon. When I got home, the mirrors at Hood Place would twist my body into unrecognizable shapes, like the convex reflections in that hospital, specifically engineered to prevent breakage of glass and people. The way the nurses talked seemed to echo the dialect of my parents in the living room as I buried my face into pillows: hidden meanings and empty sympathies, speaking down to me, over me. I left Hood Place behind, and in my memory it only seems to echo the second definition, “an institution for people needing professional care or supervision.”
I was going to be a philosopher. Philosopher’s hate regressions, arguments which are supported by something which requires its own presupposition, which in turn needs its own, and on and on and on. Because regressions continue backwards forever, and therefore there is no solid event to have set forth their chain reaction, they negate their own existence. When one falls back on such an argument, a philosopher will often dismiss them point blank. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t cut out for it. I often find myself in this state. It’s the only one I’ll exist in perpetually, because it is within itself that I am not within it.
We make sense of the world through ideas of perfection which don’t really exist, and philosophers are constantly trying to find the point at which the real world and these ideas connect. But the fact that we can always go smaller, always go bigger, that there are different sizes of infinities and that atoms are made of quarks and quarks are made of prions, only goes to show the indistinction of reality. The eternal line. The boundaries between things. The point, the smallest unit in the universe, whose definition predisposes it’s unprovability. I think I’m there. I’m always home, and I’m always lost, because I don’t have a true definition of either. Maybe that’s why it hurts so much.
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