Returning Home
Written by Sullivan Jordan
There is something so special about coming home after what feels like a lifetime. In many ways, it has been a lifetime. A lifetime of 3 or 4 months. Your bedroom is exactly how you left it, even though you don’t recognize it and you can’t remember how it looked when you left. Were all those books stacked in the corner? Was that jacket hanging on the doorknob this whole time? Did you leave those magazines on your bed?
Everything is the same really. Although it may not seem like it. The view from your house is the same, but maybe a bit more green or a bit more brown depending on how much it has rained. Your perfume still lingers on your pillow. Your favorite couch is still slightly lopsided. Your mom drinks the same coffee. Your best friend still lives just down the street. Your family dog still remembers you. And yet, you feel like maybe home doesn’t remember you or at least recognize you after a lifetime spent somewhere else. It takes time to feel like you belong again. Time moves and stands still all at once.
Home is the place where you grow up, where you make your first friend, learn from mistakes, bake muffins on the weekends, and hang up Christmas lights. But one day, somewhere across the country or around the world, you will make new friends, hang up lights in a living room that looks nothing like the one you grew up in, and now you will bake muffins on a random Wednesday every once in a while. Home is two things. A feeling, and the people who you love the most. A distant memory you carry with you that ignites when you feel like you are where you are meant to be. You’ll know it when you get there.
You look at your home, the beautiful California hills, you find coffee shops you’ve never been to, and suddenly you wish you could stay. The town you grew up in is no longer mundane like you once believed as you dreamed of building a future somewhere else. In fact, you realize nothing about it was ever mundane at all, and that there is a certain beauty to everything now, and there always had been. The way the sunlight falls through the window into the kitchen after a rainstorm makes you pause. You suddenly want to pick a bouquet of wildflowers growing in the same garden you once played pretend in.
Did you ever know your hometown at all? Were the years spent growing up really enough? Is there ever enough time? Now you’re cooking dinner for your family and baking your mom a birthday cake like she did for you for so many years. You wonder why you ever left in the first place. You imagine what your life would look like, but you know that your strong desire to stay is the truest feeling of love there is.
You will always come back and marvel at how it seems like very little time has passed, and very little has changed. But deep down you know this isn’t true. The world will not stand still for us, even if that is what we want sometimes. Each time you return, a piece of the past may be gone forever. The neighbors you grew up knowing have moved, and there’s a new house down the street. You feel like home is unrecognizable, but really, all it takes is a quick look around to understand that pieces of home will always be there. The abandoned barn at the top of the hill is still abandoned, the little library is still at the house you pass on your drive home, there are still markings on your bedroom door from when you drew on it. The pieces may be smaller and take more time to find as the years go on. You might have to look just a bit closer, but they’ll always be there.
