Displaced
Posted Friday, August 25, 2006 @ 10:04 PM
Home for the weekend, I took Mom to see Little Miss Sunshine and met my fictional character soul mate, Dwayne, whom I will continue to obsess over for a little while. Maybe one year when I get bored, I will become a mute and win the hearts of many, but first I'll have to get my French credits out of the way.
It is only my first weekend home from college, and already everything feels strange. Although I'd anticipated it, everything feels newly empty, like I have entered a room where someone's just been, the air still stirring with their scent, the window open, the curtains moving even without a breeze. My bedroom is hollow and bare, a mere skeleton of what it was last week, with blank walls and only a few pieces of furniture. In bed, I feel like the room will swallow me; it even echoes.
Now, I drive past houses my friends don't live in, an apartment my sister has vacated, a school where I was once a student. My father is in South Carolina and my mother has been in this house alone all week. The wedding gifts no longer swell in the living room, and the house doesn't smell like my father's cooking. Most of the fruit has fallen from our fig tree, and I can't smell it when I get out of my car. The only people still in town are Carolyn and Missy; Carolyn leaves Sunday morning, and Missy Wednesday.
It is hard to describe the change you feel in a place that is still briefly yours. I can't tell you how surreal it is to sleep in my own bedroom and see the spaces on the walls that, for years, have been hidden behind posters, and then to keep what I've brought with me together in one small suitcase, afraid I'll lose something in the house before I return to the dorms. It's terrifying to realize that the interstices of home—the moments in the dark before I fall asleep, the second I open the door and don't smell the lingering aroma of my father's meals, the time at a favorite intersection when I realize anywhere I drive won't lead me to my friends—will remind me of my own displacement.
Someone once used a metaphor to describe to me their relationship with someone—that, if she were sand, the tighter he tried to hold on to her as she blew threw his fingers, the faster she vanished. Home is beginning to slip through the cracks of my fingers. Soon the yard will be landscaped, unrecognizable. Soon more rooms will be empty, once my parents find a house in Greenville. Eventually there will be a sign on the lawn. There will be reunions, for sure, with birthdays and Christmas parties and celebrations, and I cannot wait. But as the sand continues to fall faster and the wind picks up, it will be especially hard to watch it go. And I suspect it will be some time before I can open my hand to trace the empty bowl of my palm, to appreciate what once was there, and the space it's left me to try and fill up again.
Welcome to the past, bucko. You're swimming through the archive of rocket-fish.org. If this isn't where you were headed, I suggest you get out of here while there's still time.
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I said more or less that when I went home this past weekend. Of course you said it better then me! I walked in my room and even with all the junk of mine still in it, it no longer feels like "mine!"
26 Aug 2006, 1:49 AM.
So well said, Glynnis. You are making me tear up.
26 Aug 2006, 4:44 AM.