Home

I’ve heard it said that teenagers will say the phrase: "it’s not fair," up to seventy times in one day.  The thought is tiring.  No, wait, let me start somewhere else.

I was restless.  I could tell that I was restless because I could tell a person the smallest little detail about my apartment from the stores of my memory.  Upon walking in one faces a wooden staircase.  At the top there is a typical wooden banister with matching woodwork spindals, rounded throughout the middle but squared off at the ends as if to create the illusion that the pegs blend seemlessly with the wood.  The kitchen opens up at the top of the stairwell.  To the right is a sliding glass door that leads to a small balcony about ten feet square in size.  There’s a fridge, an L-shapes counterspace and a small table in the room.  Opposite the balcony side, the kitchen narrows into a walkway that cuts through the apartment, the floor continues the same woodwork.  On the right side of the hall is the bathroom, to the left the bedroom.  The bedroom is a bit strange because as the walls of the bathroom reach the ceiling, the walls of the bedroom do not.  The tops of the walls stop a few feet short of the angled slants of the roof.  Continuing away from the kitchen, stairwell, and balcony, the hallway empties into the living room.  The room itslef rivals the kitchen in a size comparison, the main difference being the brown and brown carpet that covers the floor, also in the bedroom.  Small brown specs on a lighter earth tone.  The living room has three windows facing the propertym each equiped with a planting rack with fake flowers.  The screen is missing from the middle window so there is a place for an air conditioning unit in summer and a fan in the cooler seasons. 

The colors are all pastels, an ironic truth if anyone knows my personality.  Yellow in the kitchen, which I have to say, I have grown to enjoy.  Pastel blue in the living room and pastel purple in the bedroom.  I swore I would paint over these, though I never have, the more I look at them, the more I dislike the rooms.

What of all these details?  What is the point?  The point has much to do with me saying: "it’s not fair."

In the first few weeks of living here in this space, I am surprised that I didn’t wear a hole in the floor.  I paced.  I paced for what seemed like hours from one end of the dumb bell – shaped apartment to the other.  I looked out one window at the Christian Church next door only to walk towards the windows and peer down to watch the dog out on the landlord’s property.  I paced when I was thinking about watching T.V.  I paced when I got back from a run.  I paced when I brushed my teeth or listened to music.  I paced on my days off.  I paced at night when I couldn’t find sleep in the humid early september air

I wasn’t waiting for a ride or expecting company, I was just plain restless.  And even thought the pacing stopped as time went on…in my mind I was still walking the corridor from one end of the apartment to the other while I told myself that sooner or later I would have peace.  Ohh, what a word, to be at peace…the thought seems so lost on us without that it makes no sense unless we speak of death.

Did I miss home?  Most certainly I did.  But trips home brought me no release, a tiny break from the wanderings of my mind and I found myself thinking over and over again that the idea if home was a concept that I had lost forever.  Somehow, I had become a gypsy in the land of my own worry and anxiety about a future I could not know and a present that I had no influence over at all.

We ask questions of oursleves in our minds when we want to see if we’re fully awake.  Dreams can be insufficient when held up to the light of logical process, most of the rules that we are careful to follow simply don’t apply in the mind of the subconscience.  So while driving home at night when the roads seems to be a glimmer of three shiny lines leading into the abyss of space, I find myself asking questions.

"What are you doing?"

"Driving, you know that of course."

"Did you have fun tonight?"

"I think I can say that I did have fun tonight, it was a good time."

"What was your favorite part of the night?"

"Wow, there were some really good parts the whole night over…but I would have to say that the best part is that she smiles when I touch her…she smiles and looks at me with a little bit of nervousness and a little bit of excitement in her eyes."

"Is that all?"

"Well, I don’t know.  I was telling her that her dad really intimidates me, I know he doesn’t mean to, but he still does.  She said that other people had said the same thing.  She told me in the most sincere tone: "don’t worry, you’ll get used to him," but the way she said it…as if she was so sure that I would be around, that she was so ready to believe in us…I don’t know, maybe I’m just crazy."

"Maybe, maybe not.  So, where are you going?"

"Home, you know that.  I’m just about to cross over the highway now and I’ll be able to make out landmarks that I know, won’t be long before I’m in familiar territory and on my way to my bed for the night."

"Home…really, I thought that home was at least a couple hours drive away.  Isn’t it?"

"Well, yea.  Yeah it is but how can this place not be home, I’ve been here at least two years.  Home will always be home…but this place is starting to feel like home too.  It feels so strange, I can’t believe that I feel so good to go back to the apartment, I can’t believe that I feel like I have…"

"Peace?"

"Well yea…I feel at peace."

"You know sometimes home truly is where you make it, you can have the feeling anywhere you can lay your head…sometimes it just takes something to make you feel welcome, something that makes it worth staying around for."

It was at that moment that the pacing stopped.  I crawled into bed and slept like a baby full of prayers that my dreams would contain me and you.  You made home for me that night…but it just couldn’t last.

I’m looking at notes you left on my myspace pictures of Ireland.  July 22nd.  It’s just a few days later and I had to hear you say that you’re not ready to date, veiled by a mask of spirituality and "what God wants for me," words.  I trying to think how it went the way it went so quickly with so little warning.  I know that I’ve probably already had my last conversation with you and it’s left me at a loss for words.  Even tonight as I drive I can’t talk with my subconscience and tell it about the night I had filled with memories I wish I could relive over and over again.  Certainly, the feeling of home has left too, it left with the feeling of welcome and I know that you and I will never walk the kills of Ireland hand in hand. 

I’m at a loss babe…I miss you…I can smell your smell close to me…I dream of

your smile…so tonight I find myself pacing up and down the narrow corridor of the apartment, looking out the windows as a self-imprisoned captive as I ask myself time and time again where home is and how I ever lost the feeling in the first place.  I want to take this like a man.  I want to walk away with indifference and the confidence that something better is right around the corner.  But the only thins that comes to mind is the statement that seems closest to the truth: "it’s not fair."

Peace and Love

Mikey