The other night, riding my bike home from a movie, I noticed that I didn’t want to go home. In fact, when I thought of home, it didn’t even feel like home. Home felt like…
Home felt like all the other homes that I had had. The apartment I grew up in. My grandmother’s house. My parents’ house in Connecticut. Every home aside from the one I was returning to.
So, I slowed down and sank down into the feelings of longing for those homes of the past sitting there right next to the numb coldness when I thought of my home of the present. The closer I got to home, the slower I pedaled. I told myself, “I won’t go home until I want to go home.
I arrived at the intersection just before my house. I approached the house on the other side of the street from it, looked through the living room window, saw my partner sitting at the dining room table in front of his computer and rode on by.
I spent the next half hour riding my bike round and round the block grieving all the homes that I had lived in and left and all the people I had known in all those homes whom I had loved and lost. I cried and cried giving myself over to the grief and to the feeling that “home” was in the past, that what I had now was just a house that would never feel like home.
Round and round the block I went, looking through the window at Jeff each time, waiting to want to be with him. Every trip brought new memories and more tears. I was beginning to get quite cold (it was well past ten on a wintry night) but I was determined to stick with the tears until my house felt like home, like a place I wanted to go home to.
The shift began with a memory of Jeff, with a moment we had shared together, not in our house but somewhere else in our life together. In that memory, he felt like home. I still didn’t want to go back to our house but I knew I would soon. I rode around the block a few more times letting the last bits of grieving find their way into my mind.
And then, I was done. I had grieved all the places that had been home and was ready to return to the house and the life and the partner who are home.
Thoughts and Such 