Every Time I Think I’m Home

If I left somewhat suddenly (after 11 years) or you were surprised, then I think maybe you weren’t paying attention.

Every time I think I’m home, something changes my mind. Maybe it’s the porch or its the lack of the porch. Maybe it’s the wide open spaces, or the bats and the trees.

There were three different apartments in three years in London. Three different apartments in Kansas City — Oak, then Baltimore, then McGee, before I bought my house on Wyoming. There was just the one house in CT, but when you are upside down, it’s harder to get your bearings to leave.

Besides, the sheer weight of love makes it easier to stay. Once the kids moved in, I found time shape shifted– it was no longer a thing to spent or enjoyed. It was a negotiation, and wrecking ball.

The downside to moving is the leaving. How I have to take myself away from the people who love me and whom I love. But there’s some kind of madness to that method, that may be the part of why I do it. Maybe some of them love me more in the leaving, in the absence of my quirks and the memory of them. Though in the case of this most recent move, I am finding there’s a certain tragedy to removing the whole family, rather than just subtracting the one, or the two.

You have to make new friends again, when you move. You meet people at work, and you have conversations that are really surface level and nice, and suddenly you hear the acquaintance say: “let’s have lunch sometime” and you realize oh my goodness well yes of course … that’s what we have to do now isn’t it? And then it may lead to more.

So no… I guess I can’t just come home and watch episode after episode of Longmire every night until I die.

There’s no sadness in the moving, just the melancholy that’s as familiar as seasons. When the temperature drops, you do all the things you have to for time to pass. Get out the sweatshirts. Visit the fairs. Clear the garage to park the car. Get a pumpkin.

But also, you sit on the stoop and notice how the day’s ending earlier, and think how another year drops off with that day’s end.

The discontent moves with me. It’s in me. It feeds my poetry. It’s the part of me that sees beauty, so I’ve learned not to mind. I’ve learned to love its jagged edges and its sour bite.