Home

I don’t know what I’m doing. I face this fact daily and muddle through somehow. I suppose in most ways this is no different than anyone else. We all do anyway. And we pretend we know, even to ourselves. But I really don’t know what I’m doing and sometimes I look into the face of that and my heart quakes.

This week I stood upon a green hill and looked out towards the San Gabriel Mountains. It was a clear day, or clearer than usual, and I could see each rise and fall of their great shoulders, the weft and warp of their sides, the dominance of their presence usually so hazy. I looked below to the crawling concrete infestation that had failed to tame them. On foot, I could reach those mountains in a day, yet they hid in the clouds of our discontent, all but forgotten. I turned and looked in the direction of the ocean, too far to see or smell or hear. I imagined the sound of the wind in the grass and thunder calling.

And a small voice said “I’ve been here long enough. It’s time to go home.”

But there is no home to return to. It is gone. And this is home. I don’t feel it. I may never feel it. And I don’t know how to make myself okay with that. And I don’t know why I long to be okay with that. Time will pass and I will remain.

So I went to the place I call “home” but don’t feel home. I sat in my small room which looks out onto nothing and faced a blank blue wall and my reflection in a darkened screen. I lit that world up and dove in, trying to build a connection I can neither see nor feel nor taste nor touch.

Ah, touch. To be touched, not by the soft swish of fabric or the cool caress of wind or warm fall of water or solid feel of the dusty earth beneath my feet, but to be touched by those who can feel touch. I miss that. Sometimes I miss it more than I miss home.

So I sit before that flickering screen and enter the facts of my life, all those little things that supposedly make a “me” no words can ever convey. I pay good money to give myself away and hope there is another who seeks the same connection and that my courage will hold long enough to find him. I embark on another journey without knowing where I’m going or who I’ll meet or if it will fill that want I feel or make the hole wider.

My body is nomadic and my heart is haunted and my hands reach out and I don’t know what I’m doing but that I’m searching without knowing what I’m searching for. I dwell in this. It is a place and a time and a person and a feeling and somehow it is also anchorless. And nothing.

And a small voice asks “Haven’t I been here long enough? Can’t I go home?”

Not yet.