Going Back Home
EssaySome people have profound relationships with their immediate family. They speak habitually, for comfort and not convenience. They share blistering group photos on socials captioned with an inside joke. Cute pet names abound. Others have decrepit and decayed relationships with their relatives. Often times akin to the rotten flesh of carrion. These types of relationships are treated as an evil; not spoken, heard, or seen. They’re written off, like a lien on a house. The only thing left being the ever-present traumas they have caused.
Most find ourselves in a purgatorial middle. You daydream of skipping out on a major holiday, but never do for fear of a rift discerned instead of felt. You find your childhood bedroom replaced by your little sibling’s or the suburban office/gym combo. Whether you cry on a Peloton or twin sheets with adolescent prints matters little. They’re the same tears. Derived from the soft neglect you feel when a parent is never punctual. When their lack of interest in your passions and hobbies is as normal as seeing pigeons in a city.
Though they are physically there—on a technicality, they aren’t present. You tell yourself it would be unbecoming to mention their shortcomings. People have it worse; you’ve been taught. When you get older and become the parental figure in some sort of freudian role-reversal. You feel wronged. You daydream of having the kind of relationship where you call late at night for advice, tear-in-eye, or none at all. You’ve always felt resentful growing up, only to find the reason when you weren’t looking. You connect the dots. When you used to put two and two together you got three, now you get four. You start to forgive your angsty teen self; she wasright.
Where do you go when your familial home isn’t of comfort to you? It’s a question my conscious mind has trouble comprehending. “I’m going back home” is a statement of respite in your youth. As an adult, it’s tedious and cumbersome. Something to avoid. Like twisting and bending around a meandering trail filled with poison oak. By the end, your feet become mangled trying to evade the inevitable; like a ballerina’s, but without the gait. So, you give in.
It has been said many a time that you create your own family. Look at your parents. It’s assumed they created theirs, unless they’re related. Homes and families are often conflated. Many of our first experiences in an environment considered to be a “home” were of our family’s. Quite a misconception. Sometimes those two things never align. A home is not something forced upon you like a hereditary bulbous nose you grow into. Homes give meaning. They’re inquisitive, often humorous and insightful. They’re warm.
The origins of American gun culture stems from the idea of protecting one’s physical home. I hold staunch anti-gun opinions, however, you better believe there’s a minefield surrounding my metaphysical home. Maybe, at the time, there were higher conversion rates of familial homes to personal homes. Now that idea is, like gun culture, forced upon us. Maybe it was because no one knew each other as we do now. You can tell a lot about a parent by which 24/7 news outlet they subscribe to. Which frozen Trader Joe’s dinner they keep stocked in the freezer. If the March sisters knew intimate details afforded by the modern psyche, would they have been so close? Maybe it’s the opposite and we, in fact, know too little.
Most people hold healthy boundaries such as:
Less communication
An open discussion about their feelings
A once-yearly visit replacing a bi-annual
My boundary is the Atlantic Ocean. I take solace in my past being physically and temporally behind me. I find my home in the written, audial, and visual media that manage to unearth the words I haven’t; that touch my spirit. In the eyes of the man I love, doing the mundane. In his fingertips and the space between us when we speak. The advice of a stranger, like a fireplace, gives me comfort. That is my home, and “going back home” is tough when your true home is in the act of being far, far, away from it.