Week 9: Home
"Where are you from?"
The question may be a staple of introductory small talk, but it seldom feels as innocent as the questioner likely intends. I wonder what gave me away as a transplant. My accent, which I will insist I do not have? My mention that I am a recent law school graduate? Or the plain fact that no one is a native of this city unless her parents and grandparents were born and raised here, too?
I don't want to give my whole life story in response just so I can satisfy some curious questioner at a cocktail party who may never see me again. They want a simple answer, not details of pink houses with turquoise stairs, or the cottonwood tree looking out over a vast backyard covered in snow, or rhododendrons purchased for my mother's forty-fifth birthday. But the story of where I'm from will not be told in terms any more simple.
"Here," I want to scream. "Why isn't that good enough for you?"
I force a pleasant smile instead. "Washington."
If I'm lucky, they're satisfied, and the rest stays hidden.
--
When I call my parents, my mom tells me about packing up tchotchkes. First, her collection of miniature mud men went under lock and key. Then she relocated the clay horses from the bookshelves to the cabinets. Everything that someone could pick up and walk away with has to be kept under wraps. The house is on the market, so my mom is stripping all personality from it. Soon, it will be little more than a model home for potential buyers, who will impose their visions of the future upon my family's past.
I have no sentimental attachment to the house. I only went there for school vacations and holidays. But I still feel something ending. No more blood oranges, picked fresh from the trees. No more picture of the dogs and me hanging above this fireplace. I won't miss the way that the house completely failed to retain heat in the winter or the constant threat of spiders crawling up from the drains. We will probably have to leave the koi; I doubt their ability to survive a car ride to the new house.
I go to work and listen to the other attorneys talk about painting their kitchens butter yellow and resurfacing their decks. I think the landlord would frown upon it if I painted my kitchen and failed to restore it to its original beige upon the expiration of my lease. I consider buying a microwave and replacing the bookshelf in my apartment that looks like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but decide against it. Why buy more stuff when I may have to leave at the end of August?
I don't belong. I do not have a house. I do not have a spouse. I run, run, run, fast as I can. I do not like it, Lily I am.
--
If home is where the heart is, then where is my heart? When I want to feel loved, I run--to my friends out of town, to my parents in the house where I never lived. My heart will not put down roots and grow in the city where I actually reside. How can it, when I am in the process of losing everything? I lost my boyfriend, and when my term expires, I will lose my job as well.
Some sweet someday, someone will want me--not as a one-year fellow, not as a stopgap sweetheart, but me, as is, with both my good and bad. Or is that only a vain reassurance that my married colleagues trot out to placate me? Is it only a dream that I resurrect when I need some help to get through the day?
I run in search of the dream as fast and as far as I can. Everyone who loves me is somewhere else, and my next job might be somewhere else, too. But--please--let me stop running before my heart gives out in weariness. Let me build something real, something to last more than one anxiety-filled year. I'm willing to settle for two. Five would be best. Ten--how can I even dream of ten, when seven years is my maximum in any one place? When do I get to turn in my running shoes and settle down?
Until then, my home has to be where I am now. I may never get anything better. My past disappears behind me, and my future is even more uncertain. My heart is in my chest, to be literal, so my home has to be there, too.
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This has been an entry for Week 9 at therealljidol, where I selected the prompt "Home." Please take a look at the many other excellent entries that will go up this week!