For the first time since we have moved my mom has ventured back home..Alone.
Every year we head back to Westchester to visit friends and family. It's kind of torturous to go home every year to just leave it again. It feels like we are leaving permanently for the first time over and over again, and i usually get very pissed while packing up my clothes on our final day in Westchester knowing that we are returning to the very place that i feel has beaten me down these last couple of years.
Our first trip back was surreal, we had expected home would be as we had left it, but we realized how much everything had changed around us, and ultimately how much we had changed along the way. I tried endlessly to snap a million pictures of everything that had meant something to me as a child, but realized that there was too much and that it couldn't make up for not being there.
But this year i was unable to make the trip(because of school) and my mom ventured by herself without me and Morg by her side. She called me before she headed on her way and told me how sad she was that i wasn't with her "it's kind of lonely traveling by yourself" she said on the message she left me. And i hadn't realize how lonely i would feel in being left behind or that she would have to experience the memory of being home by herself.
As a kid we moved around a lot, or at least what i consider as being a lot. My mom left my dad in the middle of the night and we never looked back. We moved in with my grandmother for several years, than to New Rochelle for several years, to where we live now for several years. Sometimes i feel like we are always on the run, escaping something bigger and scarier than we could ever imagine, and i have sort of learned never to look back, that you always have to keep moving, because looking back only slows you down.
I think this constant moving never really makes you feel settled as a human being. I kind of always have one foot out the door with bags packed ready to go when the time is right.See that was thing when i was a kid i always remember leaving right when i was getting comfortable. When i began to develop friends, or when i began developing crushes. Just when they seem to be going well, we'd pack up suddenly and leave, and what always lingered was what could have been.
When we return home, when we return to the school ground, corner stores and old neighbors i never really realized that what i was missing about home wasn't the built memories and faces, but all that we had left in our past when we escaped it.
Sometimes i feel like we are returning to this unfinished sort of home. We are returning to something we hastily abandoned; door and windows are wide open, beds unmade, tv still on, and fleeting presence caught in time like a snap shot...this unresolved mess that makes it hard to gain closure with it.
Is it sad that my constant memory as a child is being reminded to never look back. That i have learned to never get close because i will just have to leave.The cab ride that night that drove my mom, brother and I to safety where i sat in her lap never turning back, the car ride away from my grandmothers which was more like a fun ride than a well deserved goodbye, and finally the biggest trip of all in which my half hearted goodbye was in due part because we didn't know what awaited us so far away.
Perhaps being so wrapped up in my childhood home has nothing to do about the sweet memories it produces, but rather the memories i feel i never got to develop. And every time i go back, it isn't for some reminder that my home exists. That there was a time i attended I.E. Young Middle School, played at 5 Island Park, or that I kissed my friend Jason near the tree at the park across from our house( i was 7 it doesn't count as a first kiss) .
Maybe returning for me is a way for me to finally close the windows and doors i leave open for my return. To ask my home for forgiveness in abandoning it so hastily, for never really saying goodbye.
I'm kind of sad i didn't get to do that this year. This goodbye is well overdue.
Every year we head back to Westchester to visit friends and family. It's kind of torturous to go home every year to just leave it again. It feels like we are leaving permanently for the first time over and over again, and i usually get very pissed while packing up my clothes on our final day in Westchester knowing that we are returning to the very place that i feel has beaten me down these last couple of years.
Our first trip back was surreal, we had expected home would be as we had left it, but we realized how much everything had changed around us, and ultimately how much we had changed along the way. I tried endlessly to snap a million pictures of everything that had meant something to me as a child, but realized that there was too much and that it couldn't make up for not being there.
But this year i was unable to make the trip(because of school) and my mom ventured by herself without me and Morg by her side. She called me before she headed on her way and told me how sad she was that i wasn't with her "it's kind of lonely traveling by yourself" she said on the message she left me. And i hadn't realize how lonely i would feel in being left behind or that she would have to experience the memory of being home by herself.
As a kid we moved around a lot, or at least what i consider as being a lot. My mom left my dad in the middle of the night and we never looked back. We moved in with my grandmother for several years, than to New Rochelle for several years, to where we live now for several years. Sometimes i feel like we are always on the run, escaping something bigger and scarier than we could ever imagine, and i have sort of learned never to look back, that you always have to keep moving, because looking back only slows you down.
I think this constant moving never really makes you feel settled as a human being. I kind of always have one foot out the door with bags packed ready to go when the time is right.See that was thing when i was a kid i always remember leaving right when i was getting comfortable. When i began to develop friends, or when i began developing crushes. Just when they seem to be going well, we'd pack up suddenly and leave, and what always lingered was what could have been.
When we return home, when we return to the school ground, corner stores and old neighbors i never really realized that what i was missing about home wasn't the built memories and faces, but all that we had left in our past when we escaped it.
Sometimes i feel like we are returning to this unfinished sort of home. We are returning to something we hastily abandoned; door and windows are wide open, beds unmade, tv still on, and fleeting presence caught in time like a snap shot...this unresolved mess that makes it hard to gain closure with it.
Is it sad that my constant memory as a child is being reminded to never look back. That i have learned to never get close because i will just have to leave.The cab ride that night that drove my mom, brother and I to safety where i sat in her lap never turning back, the car ride away from my grandmothers which was more like a fun ride than a well deserved goodbye, and finally the biggest trip of all in which my half hearted goodbye was in due part because we didn't know what awaited us so far away.
Perhaps being so wrapped up in my childhood home has nothing to do about the sweet memories it produces, but rather the memories i feel i never got to develop. And every time i go back, it isn't for some reminder that my home exists. That there was a time i attended I.E. Young Middle School, played at 5 Island Park, or that I kissed my friend Jason near the tree at the park across from our house( i was 7 it doesn't count as a first kiss) .
Maybe returning for me is a way for me to finally close the windows and doors i leave open for my return. To ask my home for forgiveness in abandoning it so hastily, for never really saying goodbye.
I'm kind of sad i didn't get to do that this year. This goodbye is well overdue.
No comments:
Post a Comment