One night when I was eight, I got so homesick that I thought I might die. The sound of my best friend’s sleepy exhales had suddenly turned menacing. Her headgear rattled and reminded me of the quiet of my own room next door. My gut ached so bad for home that suddenly I was slipping out of bed and sprinting, barefoot in the dark, across the front yards that separated our houses.
Earlier that day we had romped and hollered on these lawns. In the light they were our domain, but here in the dark they were threatening. With each pump of my legs I repeated to myself: you’re almost home you’re almosthomeyourealmost…
Nauseated and tearful, I ripped open the screen door to find the heavy wooden door of my house locked. No. No nono no.
I whipped my head over my shoulder to see if the feeling that was chasing me was my imagination but I couldn’t see past the porch step. I turned back to the glowing doorbell and jammed it frantically, arm extended above my head, believing that the dark might snatch me.
My mom whisked open the door in her robe. The force made her hair flutter and I fell into her across the threshold. “Allison! What’s happening?” Between sobs I squeaked out the answer, “I just wanted to be home.”
“Jesus, Allison. You scared me to death. It’s nearly 1:00am.”
Her voice was coming down from its panicked rattle.
“Did you and Jordin fight or something? Why are you two even up this late?”
I shook my head no into her stomach, burrowing the part between my bangs and hair like I could get back to that very first home. Her voice took on a different tone as her confusion crackled around us.
“What the hell happened?”
Still sobbing, I reiterated, “I just wanted to be home.”
“Well, did you tell anyone you left?”
Silence was my answer.
“Allison Theresa. Did you tell Nicki you left?”
I shook my head again. She was angry but held me until the tears and the burning in my stomach stopped.
I slept in my own bed. I was home.
———
The first home I remember was this one. The house itself had a kind of symmetry that matched our nuclear family. Two rooms for two kids and a backyard for the dog we had to give away. My dad, mom, brother, and I sat at the only four chairs around the dinner table. We were all at peace with our worn in spots in the living room.
The cut grass that I rolled in and picked and ate nourished me. The crabapple tree that blossomed in the spring and smelled like mildew in the fall taught me the seasons. The light bulb above the tub that I shot at with a water gun christened me with electricity the day it burst into innocuous shards in the bathwater around me. Every fingerprint on the wall, divot in the carpet, and sparkle of glitter in the grass was mine.
I wasn’t born in this house in Texas but I might as well have been.
I left this home for college assuming all would stay the same, but when I came home that summer, I found my parents’ winter coats in my closet: a slight and reasonable adjustment that shook me to my core. I remember shoving the coats to the side and shutting myself inside, resting my cheeks, hot with tears, on my knees and letting the fabric of my jeans turn from faded blue to indigo. I kept my boxes packed. I didn’t live at home anymore.
———
When I am homesick for this home, I imagine curling up in my old bedspread, the one that has a tiny cut in the bottom from my own safety scissors. I can faintly smell the taco seasoning my mom is using. The tv on the other side of the wall is playing football at a low volume. I can sense everyone’s movements and moods from the muffled sounds they make. I lie in bed until my dad calls for me to come to the table.
———
The second home I remember was one of my own making. Or more accurately, of our own making. Unlike the first house, this home arrived empty and begged me to paint it.
I picked a saturated teal and post-it note yellow and painted the walls between grad school classes. I painted right over the divots and duct-taped framed cable cord. When I was finished, my husband lied and said he liked it.
I didn’t even know if I liked it but I liked that it was mine.
We grilled steaks and drank beer under the carport where we saw a possum once. We learned how to relight the pilot light every time we turned on the heat. We spray painted a branch from the yard and hung it with lights and ornaments for Christmas. We ate half of the top tier of our wedding cake hunched over the counter on our first anniversary.
The last night I slept here was in a sleeping bag in an empty room. I’d gotten rid of so many things in preparation for our planned cross-country move, and what wasn’t sold or trashed was already on its way from Texas to New York.
As I lay there, I tried to solidify the memories of this place. The two good years of this house seemed far away and the recent nights we spent fighting or crying or both seemed much closer. It had been a long time since our marriage had felt like home, but we had promised to try and make it livable again in a new city, in a new home.
———
When I am homesick for this home, I am homesick for the teal room. I am again marveling at the arrogant destruction of my decorating, the drops of paint on the carpet, the swipes of half-wiped-off blue on the floorboards, the shoddy patch job around the cable cord. I am sitting in the freshly painted room knowing that I want to live here with my husband forever.
———
The third home wasn’t ever really home. It was an apartment a thousand miles away from everything I knew with a man I didn’t love anymore.
To no one’s surprise but our own, our Brooklyn apartment was much smaller than we’d accounted for. There was no space for the lives we were supposed to be starting here, but for six months we forced ourselves to fit.
We left half of the things we’d brought from Texas on the stoop. I lofted our bed to make room for my desk. I hung Christmas lights under the bed frame. I painted watercolor quotes like “you can be whoever, whatever, and wherever you want to be.” I bought a shower caddy before that I shook before turning on the water to scare roaches out from shampoo bottles. But no amount of nesting could make this a home.
There were loud fights within thin-walls. There were renegotiations of monogamy and attempts at giving each other space. There were reconciliations that lasted just long enough to breathe and start again. We had tossed our marriage in the back of a Uhaul hoping the distance from our hometown, from our comfort, and from our parents would mean distance from our unhappiness. But fragile things often break in a move and leaving never helped the homesick.
On the night I left my husband, I called my brother hoping to save my mom from a panicked late-night call. But he called her anyway and she gave me an address of a hotel seven blocks away where there would be a room in my name under her credit card.
———
When I am homesick for this place, I am homesick for the simplicity of a life barely begun. He and I are lying side by side. He is still my husband. I am whispering to him my fears and dreams while we hope the leak in the ceiling above us doesn’t return in the night.
———
When I moved out, I didn’t go looking for a home. I was just looking for a place to put my stuff, to lick my wounds, to sleep.
My mom coordinated a series of Brooklyn hotel rooms, makeshift homes out of thin walls and wrapped plastic cups. I talked at her for days about what had gone wrong, about the ways the home I’d tried to make in her likeness collapsed, about anything but coming home to Texas. I sensed that she was furious I was so far away or maybe that I was furious I was so far away.
I knew my home wasn’t in Texas anymore. It didn’t seem to be here either. But, I thought, at least no one will ask after my husband here. So I stayed.
———
After a month of blank rooms, I finally unpacked my suitcase and few boxes in a new neighborhood with roommates I didn’t know. I had a bed and a desk and all my books. I bought new sheets and shampoo. I slept for days.
It was during this time that the other homes came to me in my dreams.
I’d wake up in the new room and for a millisecond I’d think I was in the roach-infested apartment, relieved when I came to. Other times I’d imagine I was in the teal room, reaching for my husband only to realize he would never sleep in this bed. And, on the scariest nights, I’d wake up as an eight year old, the panic in my stomach burning. I’d slip out from the warmth of the sheets to realize home was much further away than a sprint in the dark.
———
After I could go a day without crying, after I had made new friends and pretended I was happy in the city, after I could hold it together enough to show my mom I was indeed ok, I spent a month’s worth of waitressing tips on a ticket back to Texas.
I needed to go home.
———
I met my parents at a familiar haunt. The bar smelled the same as it did the last time I was here a year ago, queso and spilled beer, but it looked different. I couldn’t pinpoint any changes in decor or even employees, but I noticed a jut of wire from the back of the neon sign, a line of dust on the floor where the dustpan failed to pick it up, a chip on a plate in the stack behind the bar.
There wasn’t much to say after the happy hour special was over and we went back to the house, but this was not the first home I remember. My parents moved into a new one the year I got married, a bigger, nicer version of the nuclear family model I loved. It is a well deserved upgrade, a modest dream home built just right, but this home was unfamiliar to me.
That first night in this unfamiliar house, I chose to stay in my brother’s room because mine — or the one designed with me in mind — didn’t feel like mine at all. His room still had his collection of baseball hats lined up on the shelf and some of his clothes hanging in the closet from his year of living here before college. The closet in my room had a filing cabinet of tax returns and my wedding dress. Being with my brother’s old things made me feel a little less alone.
I woke up with a hangover but there was another pain: a homesickness that radiated like a toothache. I drank water and took a shower to soothe the former, but the latter lingered for the rest of my stay.
———
Of course, there are other homes that I don’t remember. There is the house with the brown shag carpet and the dog we gave away when we moved. There is the place with a chainlink fence and my dad’s pick-up truck. There is the cocoon of my mother’s womb.
They are homes that have comforted and coddled me until I left and forgot them. Homes that only come to me in photographs and home videos of my dad’s feathered hair, my brother’s infancy, my mom’s swollen belly. Homes I’ve always been unable to return to. Homes that I am always homesick for.
———
At the airport for my flight back to New York, my mom hugged me goodbye. I wasn’t sure when I would see her again. I knew I didn’t need to come back to Texas anytime soon. But when she held me, I felt like I should be here all the time. We parted and, as always, she said, “Let me know when you get home.”
I arrived at my apartment in Brooklyn and used the still shiny key to unlock the front door. I sat my suitcase on an unpacked box and dusted the red dirt off my shoes. I wrapped myself in an old quilt and made a mental list of taco ingredients for later.
I texted my mom and told her I was home.