Home Enough For Me (and Other Smart Sayings)
I’ll miss this place when I leave. It’s been home for four years, but in a few weeks El Salvador will become a place that used to be home. I realize that I have never really moved past the collision that opened up this home-shaped hole in my chest. Time whistles through it and it sounds like an old man breathing and it feels like entropy. I think of that collision sometimes, back when I was young and wanderlust smashed into contentment and it knocked me, wide-eyed and thrilled, into the sky and across the sea. I didn’t find this hole until years later when it occurred to me that everything that goes up has to come down eventually, and that I don’t really know where to land. Then I had children, and I kept bouncing around the world, but I somehow simultaneously came down, and I didn’t feel the hole for a long time.
Home enough for me. (Ataco, El Salvador; May 2024)
My little brown dog understands this, I bet. He is stretched out on the carpet at my feet. He would probably laugh at the idea of a place being home. If he could talk he’d probably say, “The spot on your lap is home enough for me.” That’s a smart thing to say for an imaginary talking dog that I just made up.
When I leave El Salvador next month, I’ll also release another of my children into the world. She graduates from high school a week before we fly out. My older two children left my side with purpose, but also with just a touch of reluctance. By contrast, my third child left my side a long time ago, for all intents and purposes. Insistently independent, she’s spun away from my orbit and seemingly put as much space between us as possible. There is nothing inherently unhealthy about this, just as there was nothing inherently unheatlhy when I cut the cord tying me down and spiralled outward on the wandering wind into the world. But I don’t like it as much now that I’m the one holding the limp end of the cord that used to keep my little girl close. Where are you wandering to? is what I’m saying to the spot on my lap where she used to be. Come back home.
She’s helped fill up my home-shaped hole for a lot of years. Now I’m remembering that hole again. I hear a whistling, like time escaping, like an aging man breathing. It’s a little like home doesn’t want me anymore. That’s not the truth. But it’s not a lie either. And when something isn’t the truth and it isn’t a lie, well, that’s the type of thing that keeps you up at night, gazing at ghosts that could be strangers but smell familiar enough that you’ll sit beside them far past your welcome. I’ve got to let the ghosts go. But I’ll leave a spot on my lap just in case.
