The Last Homecoming
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back.
- Philip Larkin
Revisiting the home of my childhood feels like stepping into a giant time capsule. Very little has changed: the same furniture and carpet, the same wallpaper peeling in places now, the same drawings and notes on the walls. I can see the former shell of myself, the way I lived, the way I was viewed. The struggles and secrets, the interests and impulses, peering out at me through old photos and objects. The fog of nostalgia, settling like a heavy blanket over everything, filling the air, unavoidably inhaled. And that former self draws me to inhabit it. Does anyone else feel it, the pull?
That pull feels all the stranger because I am no longer who I was then. This is the first time I have returned after having left not for school, not for some temporary place of training, but after having settled down for good elsewhere. I have been in that other place long enough to feel my otherness here. And where I live now could not be more different than where I grew up: different ethnic makeup, different lived values, different economic climate, different social norms. The house I live in now is flung-open lit, with simple lines and open spaces; this house is hunched-in cozy and comfortably cluttered.
It is strange to be in a place so quintessentially familiar and yet so alien to who I am now. And it’s not only the past and the present at play: it’s also the future, for this is the last homecoming. The house will be sold before I’m able to come back and see it. This is the last trip, the goodbye-trip, before the eighties’ fixtures and décor will be torn down in preparation for the market. And whatever I may feel about the past, I am glad that I don’t have to be around when it gets ripped apart. The very fact that it changed so little in the past thirty-five years is what made it home, what solidified my idea of home as a place of stability. It was the candle always burning, the one physical constant as I came and went wherever life took me. It hovered like some background character in the story of my life. I’m not sure I want to be around for its future.
In her book Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng writes about children the way I feel about this house:
To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she'd been and the child she'd become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.
This house is something like that: a place that layers in the past and present and future all at one time, like a 3-D image you can glimpse if you tilt your head and squint your eyes just right. When I went up to my old bedroom in the attic, I could see the desk where I hid all my letters and journals, the corner bed where I lay awake many nights gazing up at the sloped ceiling, the places I hid books and the stairs I sat on in a daze after a boy told me he liked me for the first time walking back from the school bus stop. I remember it being the grandest, most private sanctuary. And now, I see it for the small, somewhat stuffy place it really is, too dusty for me to sleep there easily. And I wonder what will become of it. Probably its wooden panels patterned with nature scenes will be painted over at the first chance.
If I ever had a place that was home, it was this place. Not this city or this neighborhood, but specifically this house. I’ve changed, this house will soon change, but my idea of home has not. This house is the reason I want to stay in a place long enough to make past-present-future memories. It is part of the reason I want to be at home more than out in an office or clinic. After this visit, this house will pass out of my sight. I will never be able to return to it again. But it won’t really have left me in the end.
