So, I just hit California a couple of days ago. While I was on the road I sent people emails to keep them up to date on where I was and whether or not I was dead. Below the cut there I’ve compiled everything into a readable narrative. It’s like autobiographical flash fiction. You can also read about someone else’s take on the trek here.
I originally wrote the following as part of a short story.
And so I found myself back in the land of my birth, that green and red turd floating in the gulf of St. Lawrence. It’s a quiet place, Prince Edward Island, the safe kind of place you want your kids to grow up. It has its own kind of people too, the kind of insulated xenophobes you can only find somewhere like that. When I was a lad, after telling her about how I’d gotten a prestigious scholarship to NYU so I would soon be moving to New York, a friend’s mother actually asked me, “Why would you want to go there, buddy? It’s not here.”
I had no idea how to answer that. Honestly, I still don’t.
I should try selling that to the PEI tourism bureau or something.
Just like I said, here’s the first of those columns that I wrote. Actually, looking at my little stash, there are only two, plus on that’s only half done (and could be a whole book if I wanted), so this isn’t going to take very long at all. I don’t like this one as well as the other one. Less… quiet power.
Your relationship with the place you grew up, or even some place you were later that felt like home after a time, is a complicated one. When you are younger you look forward to escape; getting away from whatever it is about the place or situation that you feel is limiting you. There is no escape, though, because you will always carry everything you ever had with you, and you’ll probably never get what you want, or think you want.
Some people never get to leave. They move out of their parents’ houses and find themselves inextricably bound to that one place, never getting more than a few miles from where they started. They’ll try to see the world, but their weeks of paid vacation to Paris, or Toronto, or Disneyland, don’t bring them to that crucial point that they, and we all, are looking for. You can learn by observing strange places, but you can’t understand things without experiencing them. To get to know a place, to understand it, you can’t approach it with that ticket home in your pocket, because that means that you aren’t trying to find home there. You need to get those balls out, sever as many ties as possible, and let yourself fall in. That’s a really hard thing to do, sometimes, even if you’ve done it before.
Of course, there may be a problem with all of this: I’ve done it and I’m not sure that it’s working. I’d hoped that accumulating these experiences would give me a better view of the world. When I was expecting everything to become more clear and more easily defined even as it gained complexity, it just got bigger, and fuzzier.
While I’m away from those places where I started to form my picture of the world I want to go back, sometimes for good, sometimes just to check and make sure everything is like I remember it, to see if my earlier simpler world view is still supported by the place where it grew. Now that I have gone back, after really living and even finding the beginnings of home elsewhere, I see that some of the things I held most dear have changed, and other things have gone on just fine without me. The shop where I used to buy my guitar and sci-fi magazines is closed, and my favourite restaurant won’t let me smoke inside any more. After living in a place, and feeling like a part of the community, whose fault is it that it cuts a piece out of my heart that, upon my return, the only thing that’s changed about my favourite smoke shop is that the clerk behind the desk doesn’t know my name any more? It’s nobody’s fault, I’m just not a part of that scene any more. I’ve always been worried about people forgetting me; the last time I came home I found that a lot of people I had known before couldn’t remember anything beyond that I looked kind of familiar, and even my close friends couldn’t remember things that seemed very important to me. I felt like I was disappearing, and this time it looks like I’m gone.
I’ve come to realize that this return is essential to the journey. Without a homecoming there’s no grounding, no fact-checking examination of one’s memories and idealized internal portrayal of what was. Without this the memories have no meaning; without verification they might as well be fiction. While our experiences can still bring a larger understanding of the world, we can’t be certain, the understanding is not complete.
At first, I have to admit, this whole process left me hollow. If home isn’t home any more, am I just homeless now? It’s become more, for me, than just longing for my parents’ house, or some more familiar town, or even another country. I’ve walked the old streets and listen to the racket of memories in the old walls, but they’re not my streets or my memories any more. I guess that it’s time to throw all of that old shit aside, and approach the world with a clean slate. I hesitate to pull some Socratic shit on you, but it doesn’t work if I keep thinking of one place as home, and here as not home. So here I go, one more citizen of the world; maybe I’ll find home again, and maybe I won’t, but I’ll always keep my feet firmly in my time space location. I’m here right now, trying very hard to keep from forgetting what home feels like.
Man, can you believe it? I was so goddamned… solemn. I wrote that a little over a year ago the last time I went back to the place I call home. It doesn’t feel that way, but when I say home, it’s the place I’m talking about.
Powered by WordPress