When You Come Back

When you come back ‘home’ from the city after a long absence there are a number of things you immediately remember. The sign for your exit flashing outside the bus window that tells you intuitively that you’re close; other things are surreal. The long span of strange, industrial-abortive Connecticut fieldland swimming blanched to either side of you is familiar, as you’ve ridden this way many times before, but the farm and factory equipment dotting the land is part of a museum-curiosity world that you struggle to grasp like rusty language.

You feel misshapen inside your parents’ new home, dwarfed by the high ceilings and big big doorways, child-sized amid the cushions of a monster-sized sectional sofa that could never fit in your apartment or within the apartment of anyone you know. You had the urge to fish for your wallet when your mother’s car pulled into the driveway and you went to get your bag; you will have the urge again when you sheepishly pour the laundry you have packed into a washer that doesn’t have a coin slot.

You sit self-aware at dinner like an unwashed savage before the wonder of a home-cooked meal.  You remember feeling ugly here. A fridge full of things you forgot it is possible to get; wasabi horseradish mayonnaise, whole-grain bagels in packages of six, sweet potatoes, several flavors of seltzer, a bushel of cilantro, gorgonzola cheese, Swiss cheese, feta cheese and blue cheese; goat cheese and deli bologna and turkey sausage and a package of olive oil something or other tortas in the freezer with the sugar-free popsicles. The refrigerator is so big and so new; it has two doors, maybe, it makes ice.

Your parents have a patio and a yard and so do their neighbors. Everyone has one and it is free of city garbage and dog shit, just a narrow square view of a picket fence, children playing without the shrill edge of desperation and gestating hostility in their voices. You wonder about the function of everyone’s personal square of yard. You walk outside and there are gentle, empty streets lined with houses. There are yard ornaments and never-ending coils of sidewalk leading to more sidewalk to cul-de-sacs and you wonder where does everybody go, and then you remember they don’t go anywhere.

You wonder how can people live this way; it’s so soft, it’s so silent, and it feels like a failure. How can people live forever this way; the person that is staring at you from another square of lawn, you realize, isn’t staring because they are a threat but because they believe you are their neighbor. They smile. You forgot to put your hackles down.

You forgot how very, very dark and quiet it gets at night. You forgot what it was like to sleep deeply.

On a long long walk through familiar spots you remember with a feeling of being stricken how as a child you counted the colors on this sign here, that you loved a black raspberry ice cream with a clown face made of Reese’s Pieces in that restaurant there, a restaurant that is a different restaurant now. You remember that the naked tangles of winter branches carry yellow Forsythia flowers in the spring.

In a yard the overhanging branches of a blue Evergreen hang primeval over the pit that is dug around it; you remember what a fantastic cave/tent/hut/fort that space would have made. You feel the inexplicable urge to sit inside it; you remember you are an adult now, and how would you explain it if while you were sitting in there a child who came out to play discovered you lurking, called her parents, that’d be funny, what would you say, squatted in there like some gargoyle from the city.

You remember how to walk to your grandparents’ house.  You remember how many million times you ran up that walk to be greeted there. You remember the sounds of windchimes in the summer and Carly Simon and how when you prayed very hard for a puppy at a circle of stones that still sits in the yard you thought someone could hear you. You remember how the blue fire hydrant that now stands high to your knee was something you used to try to climb. You remember that your grandparents are gone and you cannot go inside that house ever again.

Time seems to pass differently. You have to walk around and look for a clock because you don’t really know where they are when your phone isn’t in your hand, and why would it be, since no one calls you here. You have fallen off the radar and become an untraceable being. You never really wanted to go back to your old home and you never really want to leave either. You are in a weird nowhere zone that is comfortable and anxious at the same time.

You recant all those times when you said that you wanted to leave the city when you see it sparkling and hurtling ever closer to you on the way back. You forgot how much you like your shitty little apartment and your sketchy friends and your familiar work. You told everyone you’d be back home in like a month or something but you will soon forget that you really meant it at the time.

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