Last Fourth of July I went back to Wisconsin for the first
time in a year. I took the subway to JFK
and drank two double gin and tonics at the airport bar. On the flight I ordered another gin and tonic—one
shot only this time. After I gulped it
down and there was nothing but ice in the small plastic cup on my seat-back
tray the flight attendant placed another shot sized bottle of gin on my tray
and winked at me as he drifted off down the aisle. I poured the gin onto my ice, mixing it with
the melted bits. I drank that too. I was drunk when I got off the plane at O’Hare
in Chicago. The Midwestern summer air
was just as I remembered it—warm and easy.
The humidity must have been low that day because I could feel the
presence of miles away corn carried on the breeze that brushed my arms. On the drive from O’Hare to home I stared out
the window at the highway and the farmland that stretched out on either
side. The closer I got to home, the more
the ground climbed and rolled on all sides of me. I could see forests and barns and creeks that
I knew by heart from years of looking at them from the car window. By the time I reached Wisconsin, the sun was
setting pink and orange and brilliant all across the sky. I was sobering up, with a faint
headache. It started to rain lightly and
I watched the drops trickle down the window, in front of the pink horizon. Even with the windows up and the A/C on, I
could smell the wet fields and the hot blacktop highway.
It’s funny how when the world breaks my heart, I always want
to go running back to the first place that ever broke me. Maybe it’s because it was the place I learned
resilience. Maybe it has something to do
with the intimacy of pain.
There’s nothing I like about the place I’m from but somehow
I love it anyways. I love the way it
feels to drive a mere thirty miles an hour down the street while listening to
pop radio. I love walking through the
same grocery store that I used to go to with my mother when I was young and
small enough to ride in the shopping cart.
I love the whir of the ceiling fan at night over the kitchen table while
I drink a glass of wine and tell the same jokes about the same people that my
mother, my brothers and I have been
telling each other for years.
But maybe I don’t love all those things. Maybe what I love is the feeling of having a
home. It has been seven years since I’ve
felt like I have a home. Sure, there
have been places where I feel at home.
In fact, I am very adaptable and I can quickly feel at home almost
anywhere. But the meaning of “home” is
different. I felt at home in Cannes, in
Canterbury, in Chicago. I can feel at
home when I’m living out of suitcases—which I still am, for the most part. But what I mean is that I can let life become
routine, I slip into patterns, I grow to prefer to stay in bed and watch
Netflix—regardless of where the bed is.
But Home is more than routine, more than Netflix, more than the place
you adapt to. Home is closeness—like the
way summer afternoon air presses against a Midwesterner’s skin, like the heated
air that stays too long in the same place in the winter. Maybe home is not where your heart is. Maybe home is the place you know by
heart. Hopefully, hearts can memorize
new places.
When I think of the things I get homesick for, like the dirty
brown lake where I used to swim and eat potato chips, it is not the lake I
miss, it’s the way I knew it so well. Of course, that was part of the reason I
left. When I am home, all I ever want is
to run away. When I am away, all I want
is a home to run back to. And so I
listen to 90’s country songs when I’m alone and I drink too much and I romanticize
the place that taught me how to break and how to wave my bruises like a banner
on Independence Day.
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