Coming Home

Home. Over the past year this word has become a puzzle to me. Something I've tugged at and stretched and picked at, trying desperately to unravel it. To make it cover me where I am. To make my home where I am. Ode to a snail--who carries his home on his back. But we are not snails. We are yard sales of miscellany and collected bits. We overflow into storage rooms and walk-in-closets and corners of basements. Our things proliferate. But even the metaphor of home--even the intangible feeling of what makes us glow inside, what brings a flush to the cheeks--even this is difficult to cultivate and carry.

I'm thinking about Home a lot right now because we've moved again. A spur-of-the-moment move half-way across the country. And we're back in an apartment, and walking everywhere. We're in a city again. I love it. I miss other things. I wonder, as I did less than a year and half ago when I moved to Atlanta, what it's all about. Who I am when I physically move myself to a different space. I'm at the intersection of space and "the now." It's just as confusing and mystifying as the intersection of space and memory. These are the Shibuyas of emotional import.

What makes me who I am? What makes me ok being who I am, where I am. Why is it so difficult for us to be in a new environment--even if it's better? We are creatures of habit I suppose. Especially me. Give me a warm seat and a good book and I won't move til it's done. I could eat the same thing for breakfast lunch and dinner for weeks at a time. And now I'm in Chicago and Gordon works all day and I still haven't gotten myself out of boxes.

I find myself paralyzed. Unable to DO anything. All I want is to sink myself into something that will consume me and take me completely away from here.

And yet.

And yet.

"And yet all the while you are you, you are not me.
And I am I, I am never you.
How awfully distinct and far off from each other's being we are!

Yet I am glad.
I am so glad there is always you beyond my scope,
Something that stands over,
Something I shall never be,
That I shall always wonder over, and wait for,
Look for like the breath of life as long as I live,
Still waiting for you, however old you are, and I am,
I shall always wonder over you, and look for you.

And you will always be with me.
I shall never cease to be filled with newness,
Having you near me."

D.H. Lawrence, "Wedlock"