Notes on Home

“It was the first part of my life/ The second is the rest.” – Smog, Drinking at the Dam

I went home this weekend. I only call it that because I do not have another word. Is there a word in the English language for something that used to be home? For a half-home? For a place with elements of home? I am left inarticulate. All I know is this feeling has something to do with the yearning for a home that is becoming more and more intangible, for a home that exists in small spaces, in dozens of them at once. And it was harder this time, in Miami, to make sense of all of these small spaces, possibly because parts of it were so easy and automatic, like breathing.

I flew in and out of Charlotte. It is a new airport for me. (Does this mean I have a new home?) It has rocking chairs and police officers on Segways. New York and JFK International have been amputated from my life; at Charlotte, they have not a single vegetarian option at the packaged sandwiches stand. The flight feels differently—shorter and lower to the ground. We do not fly in and out over the Atlantic shore, as we did from New York, but instead we fly over the Gulf Coast, passing the swampy nothingness of the Everglades both ways. We hover over Miami for much longer before landing, so I can really process what it looks like from above, and without even knowing why, I hear the words in my head like a mantra, “my city, my city, my city,” and elsewhere in my body—perhaps my heart? —it feels like a lie.

I went to the wedding of two people I have known almost ten years. They were married in the exact place in which I met them all those years ago. I held the 7-month-old baby of my surrogate sister. I have no ability to control nor fathom the unconditional love I feel for a tiny thing I have spent less than a few days with.

My mother is moving. I packed up my room. Most of its contents were useless to me, things I did not remember I had. And yet I did not throw out as much as I should have, maybe because I felt I needed things to move into a new house, to assert my presence there even as I have no room of my own, but only a priority spot in a “guest room.” There were hundreds of photographs and hundreds of notes, delivered between classes over the span of six years. I read some of them. I was embarrassed for all of us. We thought we were adults; we were self-important. We confused love and drugs and sex for maturity, when really it was just the opposite, and all of these things were exposing how little we really knew about ourselves. Everything in high school was so fucking important. “No!” Jordan cries, “it was important. That’s what was so great about it.” It is true that I will never feel as strongly about anything as I did about everything back then.

I waded through the detritus of my adolescence, trying to piece together what was different and what was the same, trying to connect the authors of the notes to my current friends—they are all still my friends! What a miracle! What does it mean to know someone for that long? There seems a paradox in my still unimpressive age and the length and depth of my history. I am only getting farther away from things. How is it possible that the recognition of this stability in my relationships is currently making me feel so utterly rootless? Where and who is home? Can I find myself solid and strong without it or them? And what do I do with all of these notes that are currently en route to a bedroom that isn’t mine?

This is home:

In Miami: Ives Dairy Road; the small strip of beach in front of the Radisson; Shabbat dinner at the Ben-Horins’; Sage Bagels; Jordan; the valet and doormen in my Bubbie’s building who recognize me and wave me through; Bubbie

In New York: Washington Square Park; 2nd Avenue and the Bowery; B and H; the platform at the Myrtle stop in Bushwick, with a view to the church spire; Cliff and Howie; the 6, E and J trains; the walk East on 10th street from Gemini Salon to Bagel Bob’s; Spring; Bowery Poetry Club

In Spartanburg: Derya’s couch

Everywhere: my quilts; Weezer, Blind Melon, The Microphones; my brother

Home is love, I suppose, but that too seems an unforgivable oversimplification.