For the first time in my life, I feel homesick - a deep sense of longing for the comfort and safety of childhood. I feel homesick for a place that doesn't exist. It doesn't exist because the home that I grew up in is not the kind of home that you long for or miss. It isn't a place that you ever look forward to returning to - it's a place you hope to get out of, you dread going back to, and you spend a lifetime trying to get over it. What I long for is just an idea, a fabrication. It's a figment of my imagination built out of other peoples’ stories.
I wonder sometimes what it would be like to go home to a place where I still had a bedroom that still had my own things in it. The benign remnants of my childhood like old art work, favorite toys and books - things that might evoke fond memories or make me laugh. There isn't much left, only photographs really. Photographs and memories – but they are memories that can't quite be trusted.
I like to think sometimes that I escaped my childhood and in escaping, I left it all behind. The exact moment that I thought I had escaped was when I first moved to Chicago after graduating from undergrad. It was only a matter of time before I realized that the past had beaten me to Chicago and already unpacked and settled in before I even got there. I hadn’t escaped - I had merely survived, which is entirely different.
My home is here in Chicago, or wherever I go, but it isn’t where I came from. What is left of my childhood exists really only in my mind, and is recreated sometimes when I spend time with close family and friends who have known me my entire life. We laugh about it sometimes, but the truth is, I don’t ever really know whether to laugh or cry. I just miss a time and a place where I could feel safe and secure, free from worry and anxiety and the things in life that children shouldn’t have to deal with. I miss these things that I’ve never had and I miss them tremendously for some reason. I’m homesick for a place that I can only imagine and a place that doesn’t really exist.
2 comments:
Linz,
you had me in tears reading this. I understand your feelings of missing what you never really had. It is something you see around you and you pretend to relate to but it is really just a illusion to someone who never experienced it. Your best guess at what that must really feel like. You can never go back and do it over but you can heal and move forward. Your own family that you create now is another chance at that (and I don't just mean having children!) I believe that sometimes it is the children you have and sometimes it is just making the decision to take care of yourself and that little girl that is still hurt by all that she missed out on.
keep writing..you always were such a good writer!
Jod
Kind of a garden state rip off though...
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