Home

What is home?

I'm not sure that I fully grasp the concept. I've been diving back into my memories trying to pull truth from the shadows that fill my mind. There is so much to go through and I have found myself forced to step back and take it all in segments...

Bit by bit. Little by slow.

Relationships, religion, orientation, etc. There are so many things that I need to break down and sort through. To fully dissect. I've decided to start with a more objective part of my childhood. My home.

Up until college, I lived in only one house. 18 years of my life primly took place in that wooden, yellow structure. My earliest memories were bright and full of light, but I remember the way it changed over time. The older I got the more I felt the need to retreat and escape deeper into myself. Closing myself away in my bedroom and drowning myself in music to escape that which resided just beyond the thin walls and cheap plywood door. Though I must confess that I was often grateful that I could so easily discern who was where from the sounds that resonated throughout the house.

I loved and hated that home. It was always cluttered and there was so much dust, mold, and mildew constantly afflicting us. There was junk everywhere and the place always smelled bad. Not to mention the bugs...but it's where my things were. It's where I kept my secrets and silent hopes; my dreams to be more than nothing. But also, loving that home was preached and proselytized often. Afterall, if I wasn't grateful for it God would simply take it away from me to teach me a lesson. But then again...if I loves it too much He was likely to take it away to teach me a lesson...

It's messy enough without getting into religion...

And I was expected to clean those messes. There were a lot of clutter, both physical and abstract, that I was expected to organize or make disappear. I often found it thoroughly overwhelming. Some days I simply shut down and resolved to accept whatever punishment I had "earned" for failing to fix the home. What should have been a place of peace and safety, my prime refuge, was instead a place of instability and lingering threats. Yet when the time came to leave, I was terrified to do so.

At 18, I sat on the couch shaking with anxiety over leaving for college. I was terrified of facing the world and failing, of stepping beyond the walls of the shelter that I had grown accustom to, fully bound by the ignorance of how restrictive and crippling it would be to stay. I could not acknowledge the truth because I was taught not to. I retreated from people, even though I found that people being present would mitigate the threat. The house was never safer than when there were witnesses present, yet it was embarrassing to make them endure the state of it all.

I can speak very little of intentions. It is impossible to know what was in the hearts of my care givers. While I doubt that it was their desire for us to live in the rot, they neglected to remove it from our midst. A garden that is unattended will grow wild and wicked no matter how many flowers you drop into the soil. I remember the flowers but I also remember the thorns, and I was conditioned to embrace both while only speaking of the beauty of the flowers.

Beauty came and went, but the pain was ever present. I do not deny the beauty, but I am still wounded by the thorns that my family wishes I would ignore and not bother to point them out. Even when I find myself in a place of peace, I am constantly wary of thorns among the flowers. Every good thing comes with a threat of violence and suffering.

Once I managed to leave, I haven't been able to stop leaving. I find a little more safety and a little more peace as I go from dwelling to dwelling, but the shadowy threat still lingers. The experiences of my childhood home have followed me well into adulthood. I have recently moved into a new place and my greatest priority is to establish the space as a bastion of peace, love, and protection; to make the apartment serve my need for shelter and sanctuary. After all this time, I am sorting the flowers from the thorns and growing a garden of my own.