Home, by Arianna Schioldager

I saw someone the other day, someone who used to mean something to me, and the air disappeared for a minute, but not in the way you would imagine.  I wasn’t breathless for him; my heart skipped no beat.  In fact, my breath stood intact, undisturbed, but everything else around me went solid, as if frozen, but only for a brief interlude and then the orchestra of hammer and nails, the comings and goings of life and of noise, returned.

When I looked at him, I felt nothing, saw nothing really, for the person to whom I once entrusted secrets, fears, loves, and it dawned on me, you can’t really ever go home again.

We took a drive, my family and I, when I was fifteen.  We were visiting Alaska and were looking for the house in which my mother spent some of her childhood. I wish I could I recall more of the details of the house, for we did find it, but I was a teenager, stubborn and insubordinate.  Memories that were not my own, were at that time of no importance to me – but she needed to find her years.

The house was on a corner.  It was single story, with a small front lawn, that curved like a hip up to the front doorstep.  I think it was brownish in color, a little doldrums of a place.  I could tell by the look on my mother’s face, that it wasn’t as she remembered.  There were parts that had shifted, as if the bones of the house were like butter, melting and freezing with the change of seasons, moving and spreading as the years past.

I could tell that she wanted something, needed a sign, the song of a bird, a memory to surface and come to life.  Her baited breath sucked all the air out of the car, and she got out, gently closing the drivers side door behind her.  She stood across the street and just watched, needing it to be more than a memory, but it wasn’t. I think she might have sat on that corner for years, waiting for whatever it was she needed, had we let her.

I was watching someone realize that you can’t ever go home again.

When I was away at college, my parents decided to sell our family home.  This wouldn’t be the first move.  When I was two, we moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles. When I was three we moved from a rental in Beverly Hills, to the home where I grew up.  Still this was different. I had clear memories in this home, markers of life – those I could recall myself, not ascertained through photo books or others memories.

Songs sung in my shower, my First Communion banner that hung above my bed for years, the window in my bedroom where Los Angeles broke into my room every morning and the couch where I’d snuggle up and watch Reading Rainbow.  There were late night phone calls, friends snuck into my bedroom, the garage where I first reversed a car out of, and onto the street.  The same garage where I learned to ride a bicycle with a belt strapped around my waist and my father trailing me.  The closet where I’d watch my mother dress.  The bathroom where I’d watch my father lather and shave.  I remembered all of these things when they told me it would no longer be ours.  It was where I learned to cry, learned to love, to hate, to shout.  The place I first learned of death.  The home where earthquakes shattered glass jars in the pantry. Birthdays, Thanksgivings, and stomach flus.  It all accumulated like pennies in a jar, and then one day it was gone.

I pass it sometimes trying to avoid traffic, jetting down old familiar streets and alleyways.  Sometimes I forget it is even there, but other times, the air goes still around me, and I take a breath within a breath, and I feel that rush of nostalgia, a little painful in its wake.  But if I stop to look, stare at front windows, the front gate, the garage hill I once tumbled down, I can’t remember.  I only see it if I close my eyes.

And sometimes they’ll tear up, because I know I can’t go home again.

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