This is my first sort of life post like this, so chances are this will be a little awkward. Stylistically speaking.
I’m fresh off of three essays and a free period, and heading into winter break on a disappointing start. It’s not the same leaving campus accompanied by ten or twelve other free-period students who have elected not to hang around and watch their friends take their exams. Walking to my dirty 2003 Mazda the next few weeks wrapped itself around me, that this is my last Christmas at home.
Sure it’s not actually my last Christmas here. When you’re living on campus you’re kicked out during summer and winter break, so I’m more or less forced to spend at least another one here. But really, I’m not going to be here. Not all of me. I’ll still have my life down south to think about. Next semester’s classes. My thesis. My dissertation. Eventually, I’ll have my apartment to think about, and my new home. Sure I’ll return here as often as possible, but it won’t be my home anymore. Much like how wherever I end up won’t be my home. I will start a family in my new home, watch my children grow and learn, their features shaping into adulthood, they’ll have their mother’s eyes. And although it will be their home, and the one that I will watch myself grow old and tired in, it will never be my real home. I will not have grown up in this home, its walls will never meet the glance of my young eyes, never feel the touch of that first layer of cells a child is born in.
Much like the former skin of a freshly molted serpent, in leaving home I forsake my right to it. It will never be mine again. Outwardly, it will forever appear as though it is my home. It will continue as the same building, and my room will continue as my room until it is nothing but rubble. But never will it cling to me, I will never allow it to swallow me whole.
I find it a melancholy thought to run across my mind as I sit, still recounting what I had done wrong in my commentary of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon hours prior. I begin to wonder if my father views this home the same way. I wonder if he remembers, at his age, the path from his bedroom to the entrance of his home. I have no doubt he does. I have no doubt I will either, nor my sister. Though his home has likely seen the faces of hundreds of others in the forty years since his departure, I doubt it has forgotten his. It is a shame that against his best wishes, he will never find the space in his mind to reciprocate this fondness. I will miss this home.
I think I’m going to pick up reading again.