Monday, September 29, 2008

A Response

If you grow up the exact moment you realize that where you grew up is not your home, perhaps I'm submersed in the process of growing up ---- awaiting the epiphany.

The house where I spent the last (often miserable) nine years of my life is not my home. I am much more at home in this square, bare cinder block room living within five feet of six other people and the length of my old sitting room from a dozen others. Here, in a dark corner on the third floor, I am more content than I have ever been before.

Yet, when I drove to my old home one weekend (when I realized just how much more I consider campus my home now), I couldn't help shouting in ecstatic nostalgia as I sped over the Tarrant County Line. I got a rush of welcome and knew that no matter how far I travel, where I move to or for how long, this metroplex that I grew up in will always be there. It will always be the place I know like the back of my hand, the place I prefer to anywhere else for little delights that pale in comparison to greater entertainments abroad, the place where I have memories, the place where people will be waiting for me (at least for sometime), the place that really truly means something to me and for good reason.

The town (and surrounding cities) is my home, but my house is not. Though I've refused since the age of 12 to formally refer to my house as my home, I think the critical factor ripping the label permanently away is that I don't know how much longer it will be there. It could be longer than I think, but I know that it is going away to be replaced by a myriad of storage houses, dorms rooms I can barely afford, one-week sojourns in one-room apartments and unknown quarters abroad.

Where they will be? Rockport Rockland. But no. Seattle Portland Camford .... Glasgow Denton Kashmir Austin Manhattan. "Dissociate me across the hemisphere" and beyond.

Who will they be? A vague idea. Hopes and dreams of friendships to last. Certainty of mother and brother. The three of us will be forever moving. Gypsies across the modern world. Troubadors of love, art, intellect and discovery. Screw our old permanence. Fuck our old ties and responsibilities. We will live for each other. With each other. Wine Music Cuisine Painting Travels Writing Relations Nature Lovers Spirituality Work Change Peace New. That is life we will carve together, coming as one and apart like a sine curve. We are the three and we are my home.

Hello Southwestern. Hello Austin. You are my current loves. A flirtatious affair that could last through proposal.... but I'll break your heart just as it gets good and move on to another city --- similar, better but still with its problems. I'll have intentions to leave it just as I did the others. Always falling in love with houses and homes, but never envisioning a committment for life.

1 comment:

Kate said...

I like this response a lot. I sort of agreed/disagreed with the quote too. Sort of.

I show up still in your followed blogs as Strawberry Cup-Kate (I really just got tired of the whole pink-theme thing that has to come with 'strawberry') I hope it gets changed to blue ingenue

it was almost gonna be ingenue zen, but I don't know half as much about zen as I do about being depressed. Haha.