A scream of loneliness or perhaps one where I cannot hear a word. I ruin all my friendships, and then wonder, why am I alone?
I’ll send you a postcard when I get there.
Or maybe I won’t.
It depends.
Will you be there when I come home?
I think of people as fitting into three categories – leaves, branches or roots. Leaves wither away fast, the branches stay and add something meaningful to life, holding you up and making you look pretty. All I am looking for, though, is a root. The stability and love of someone who is here forever. Right now, at this moment, I feel so alone.
Is there even an “alone”? Or is it something I made up. Is there a getting away from my thoughts or will I never kick the baggage away far enough. I feel deeply alone to the point where I cannot remember a time it was not this way. People come and go like the waves crashing on the shore. Some leave a mark and some don’t. Some are leaves, some branches and some roots. What do you want them to be, is the question. Are they there forever, or for the moment you’re in? Temporality can be comforting. You push them away, make them leaves or if you’re lucky, branches. There doesn’t exist a possibility of a root because could you even open your heart up like that?
Sometimes, I doubt I feel emotion. The spectrum too small, each feeling too ephemeral. Joie de vivre doesn’t exist. Can I show this side to the person I want to be a root? Would it even hurt if they left? I wonder why I cannot feel? Did something happen to make me feel this way? A moment shifted it all, but I can’t seem to remember which one. A collection, collation of them, perhaps. How do I tell them that all this time they spent loving me, I was waiting for a tipping point when they would not? How do I tell them that no matter what I could not love them the way they did me?
I think of the root as home.
There’s this thing right, that when you die your entire life flashes before your eyes? I think what flashes are the big moments, the times you can point out in your life that have been significant. I think home is the in-between, the little moments that you might not even remember but that’s what makes you.
Home is what makes you. It is the pain that adds to you. It’s a character-building exercise, albeit one I often wish I could do without.
My house doesn’t feel like home anymore neither does this campus. I live a wanderers lifestyle. Hitchhiking, on the backs of the people around me. My physical space never constant. I move between these places so often that neither has the chance to fully enchant me, I have the chance to make memories in neither. This absence is a hunger, a void eating at me. Something that was once my anchor, feels not so anymore and something that I’m trying to mould into, it feels far from it. I want to be my worst self. I want to be disgusting and mean and not have to hide pieces of myself. If it was home I would be unapologetic. Most of all I don’t want to be alone. I want to feel. Everything.
Just one look and my heart calms down. The beating of it slows. They are home. None of us has any idea what it’s like to be the other but no matter how many times we’ve hurt each other I still want to be seen by them. I want them to understand me. They will always let me come back, go back home to them, lay with them and tell them about my mundane days. I crave to peel back the layers to show you the messy, flawed mosaic that makes me into me. The jagged edges, the sun-bleached scars, the laughter that bubbles up like a hidden spring. I long for someone to trace the constellations of my fears and weave stories from the jumbled mess of my dreams. Perhaps you can’t unmake the baggage I carry, but can you at least hold it with me, share the weight on this journey towards home?
Home could be someone, like you were for me. Or, someone completely new. We revel in our experiences together. Who knows? Maybe I am my home. There are places I visit, things I will experience that will make me feel different ways, but for now I am stuck in this tiny little place with my bare room, making the best of the situation. I don’t know what home will be. But, I know it will be one day.