Thomas Wolfe wrote a novel titled “you cant go home again” When I first heard this I figured what he meant is that you cant move back home in every literal sense. You can, I have seen many a friend do it. Either post breakup with tear stained cheeks, or financial reasons with shameful eyes and empty pockets and even sometimes because the parents are the ones that need you. For whatever reason, in most situations yes, you can go home.
Although I really believe that what Mr. Wolfe was referring to was that once something is gone you cant get it back. The whole concept is one that is more frightening to me than any ghost story could ever be. Yet a reality I am forced to face.
Sometimes I try to convince myself that I can go back home. I find myself driving the hour back to the town where I grew up, or in your bed or the passenger seat of your car, just like I always have. I unlock the door to my childhood home with the same key I’ve always used. I sit at my kitchen table with the same worn in chairs we have used for years of dinners, family game nights, birthday parties or sheet forts in the living room. The chairs make the same creak when you sit on them, they are a bit worn on the sides but they still look the same but somehow distant, they are not mine anymore. This is not my home, You are not mine.
My room is no longer painted pep-to bismol pink with angsty teenage quotes and plastered with pictures of smiley faces from summer camps and sleepovers. My room is now white, with an Ansel adams painting hung over the place where my vanity use to be. My furniture is gone. Although it is furnished with a bed for guest and a small desk It feels as empty as the pit in my stomach as I look at it. This is not my room anymore. This does not belong to me its just a faint memory of what use to be.
When I find myself alone at night, no one else around, my mind drifts back to what was. Guilt forms a blanket over me where my down comforter once was, only its not soft and cozy its hot and itchy and all the sudden made of lead. I am forced to lay there unable to move, faced with my own reality. No one left you little girl, you left. You were not thrown out in the cold. You packed up all your belongings into brown boxes lined with duct tape and moved across the ocean.You decided to leave. You left.
You cant go home again. I am stuck in this conundrum every time. If it tugs at my heart when i see the skeleton of my room why do I go back home? Why do I sneak back in your bed, tracing my fingers in swirly patterns across your back? Why do I pick you up from the airport??
The truth, The truth is that when I don't go home I am just stuck with memories. Memories that haunt me night and day. I would rather live with the day to day pain in my chest then long for something so far away. I would rather have you tell me about the girls you have replaced our nights with then not hear your voice at all. I would rather hold you and know I can never have you again then sitting home alone trying to remember what it was like with you in my arms.
You cant go home again, but you certainly can visit from time to time. and for now, i think I am ok with that.
