Home, Pt. 2

Being back home is very strange. I think Vicki summed it up perfectly tonight, as she often does, when she told me, "Half of your body and soul left here a long time ago, and now you're back and that half is like, what the hell are we doing here?"

Amen.

I wasn't expecting this place to feel so little like home. I have been aware over the last two years of the distance growing between myself and this place that used to be my home, but I am still surprised that my old room is not at all the safe haven that it used to be; now it feels more like simply a reflection of my younger self. Sometimes when I'm driving around Norcross I realize that I have forgotten all my old shortcuts and lost the easy knowledge I used to have of which routes are the fastest at which time of day, and I find myself thinking, "I don't live here anymore! What does it matter?" This town has no attraction for me anymore, not even that created by the pride I used to feel in knowing its roads like the back of my hand. The only real times I feel deeply at home here are when I'm driving to Onelia's house, or driving back from Tiffany's late at night, when there are no more cars on the road. The rest is just buildings with history.

Maybe I'll put some of those roots back down this summer, but I doubt it. The roots that used to tie me to my room and to familiar roads have dried up and been gradually replaced by the ones I've grown deep into the soil in Asheville, and even in Myrtle Beach. But I don't even identify Asheville as being fully my home. I think that somewhere in my past few years of ramblings I became a wanderer, that that half of me that is so long gone from Norcross is at home wherever I'm living out of a suitcase. There is a part of me that misses that feeling, that wants to be driving with a backseat full of suitcases on to some new place and new adventures. To that part of me, my car feels more like home than my mom's house in Norcross.

It is strange, being "home" and yet not really being home. I wonder if I will always feel this way, if I'll ever really settle down or if I'll always be a wanderer at heart.