Homeless

“Maybe that’s all family really is; a group of people that miss the same imaginary place.” - Andrew Largeman, Garden State

    Sitting on the plane, just as it was taking off on my first trip to Denver, I tried to envision my new home: a sloping green lawn with a narrow concrete path and stairs leading to the front door carved into its side.  Flowers trimming the edges of it.  A basketball hoop hanging over the driveway.  I shook myself out of imagination realizing that my mind was stuck on an image of my old home.  I sat by the window and looked down upon the quickly shrinking California coastline.  The sky was a brilliant, September blue becoming deeper and deeper as it rose from the horizon.  The ocean had never sparkled more; it was green covered in flashes of blinding white.  The beach umbrellas, striped and dotted, shrank quickly: first becoming small dots and then dissolving completely into the sand below.  My brothers are sure going to miss this, I thought. 
    As the plane started its descent into the solid grey sky that hung ominously over the Denver area, I decided that I had to at least try to picture what Colorado looked like.  I imagined rocky terrain with large patches of moss, evergreen trees, and fields of wildflowers and grass.  Everyone was waiting for me when I arrived at the terminal: Mom, Dad and my youngest brothers, Mark and Andrew.  We all piled into the Suburban and got on the highway.  I was able to see immediately that what I had imagined was completely wrong.  Everything was flat, brown, and dead right up to the foot of the Rocky Mountains.
    My parents moved to Louisville, a town just a few miles east of Boulder, the summer before my junior year of college.  My dad was offered a promotion in the company he worked for, but in order to take it he had to move his family to where the corporate headquarters was.  He spent many sleepless nights for months trying to figure out the right decision.  In the end he couldn’t turn down the offer.  I wasn’t upset with him though.  He had two sons in college, myself at Cal State Long Beach and my brother Paul starting his freshman year at USC, and a couple that would be college-bound in just a few short years.  I knew that he didn’t have any other choice if he wanted to support us. 
    My parents tried to find some way to keep our home, but it just wasn’t going to be possible.  We had to say goodbye to our residence of seventeen years.  Seventeen Christmas’s.  Ninety-five birthdays.  Countless team parties: baseball, basketball, water polo, volleyball.  I played catch with my dad in the backyard; he taught me how to throw a baseball.  Mark ran down the wood floored halls with his socks on, slipped, and had to be taken to the emergency room for stitches.  My brothers and I wrestled in a bedroom that two of us shared: jumping from bed to bed and then on top of each other.  I asked my girlfriend to marry me on our front lawn one freezing December night when I was eighteen because I wanted to know what it felt like.  My arms were around Paul and my Dad as all six of us stood in a circle inside the empty living room praying for protection as we were about to go our separate ways and leave forever.
    In preparation for my family’s departure, I moved into an apartment in South Pasadena with three other guys a couple months before the big move.  The apartment was in constant chaos: dishes everywhere, soiled carpet, waking up to find strangers asleep in the living room.  Our kitchen sink was festering with mold and stench from weeks of meals slowly decomposing into a green and blue ecosystem buried under plate after plate and pan after pan.  Our one bathroom was perpetually musty like an old basement that hasn’t been visited in years.  The rim of the toilet caked in dry urine.  It was the furthest from home that I could have been, and once my parents moved, I began to realize that my apartment could not be my home--just my apartment.
    Home is not just a place where you lay your head.  You have to have family; whether that means your actually family or friends that are as close as family, it is vital.  My family gave me support.  They loved me no matter what was going on in my life.  I could always depend on them.  My roommates began as friends but eventually became strangers.  No one wanted to claim any responsibility for what was happening around the apartment.  Everyone figured, “As long as I don’t say anything, I won’t have to do anything.”  An unspoken tension arose between us, something that never happened at home.  I was reminded of the first line of Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro.”

The apparition of these faces in a crowd.

That’s all my roommates were to me: an apparition.  I passed them by going about my daily routine as if they weren’t even there.  They were ghosts haunting my apartment with spilled beer and cigarette butts.  Family is an essential part of what home is, and that was not happening at my apartment.  I longed to be back with my family and to see the new place that I would be calling home.
    As we arrived and started to pull into the garage, I thought to myself I can do this.  This can fill the void.  We got out of the car, my brothers grabbed my bags, and we entered the house.
    “Welcome home!” my mom said, giving me a big hug.
    I wanted to fully embrace that statement: more than anything.  I wanted it to feel the same as it did just a few months before.  I wanted rescue from the hell that I had been living in but I only felt half of what she said.  I did feel welcome.  I could breathe a sigh of relief because I knew I was with my family again; however, it was at that exact moment I realized that this was not and could never be home.  While I had family, I was still missing a vital part of what home was for me: memories, a history, a childhood.  This new house was a mystery.  Not just the house but the city and the state my family now lived in were mysteries as well.  I was a foreigner in what was supposed to be my home too.
    I smiled because my mom gave me a hug and I hadn’t had one of those in a while.  She gave me a tour of their new home: five bedrooms, five bathrooms, two living rooms, furnished basement, two offices, dining room, breakfast room, and a massive kitchen.  I had to admit that it was certainly a step up from the old place but it was empty.  Even with all the new furniture and some of the old, as well as our pets, the old t.v., my brothers and my parents, the house was completely empty to me.  I felt disconnected from everything that was happening there.  I saw schedules for my brothers’ sporting events that I knew nothing about and would not be attending.  There were welcome letters from a church I had never been to.  I heard messages on the answering machine left by people I had never met.  I didn’t feel comfortable answering the phone because I didn’t live there, had never and would never live there.
    Where could I go now?  I was counting on their new home to be mine as well but there was no way that it could be and I was certainly not looking forward to returning to my situation back in California.  I realized that I was homeless.  I still am.  I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t for a while; many college students live away from their families.  Few can say, however, that their parents no longer live in the house they grew up in.  That is where I am different.  When I go to visit my parents, it is just my parents’ house never my home.  Only family and memories can turn a house into a home.
    When I finally accepted the fact that I was homeless, I decided that I would only have a home again when I started a family of my own.  Before that I will just continue to live with friends who come and go and in places that have no meaning to me.  Once I start my own family, I will begin to build my own memories.  I will have my own house, my own children, my own family.  It is also apparent, however, that home will never mean the same thing to me ever again.  Even though I will be forming memories with my own family, they will be completely new and different.  I will never be able to return to what I thought of as home but eventually my homeless wandering will end.  I will once again be able to call the place where I lay my head home.
 

Reviews

[MadasonBlue]

This is brilliant. A little awkward--at parts--because of punctuation, but I love it.

In the very beginning, you made it obvious that it wasn't only family or money or belongings or memories that made a house a home: it was all those things together.

You did a wonderful job of bringing together several events of your life and turning them into one of the most important things of a happy life: home. The fourth paragraph is what I'm talking about, of course.

And then there was the in-depth description of the apartment, and it was easy to tell what about this new place made it... not so valuable.

The third from last paragraph was one of my favorites. In just a few unimportant things, you summed it up again.

This is very nice. I enjoyed reading it.

[Sorry Infamous]

Where we love is home,
Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Wonderful, easy for the reader to relate. Everybody has felt that way at one time or another.