I sat on a train reposed in Philadelphia, awaiting the cha chink and soft lurch of my body before “OUR FINAL DESTINATION WILL BE NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK CITY OUR FINAL DESTINATION.” It was the first time I had ever skipped lectures for something that would not count for class credit. My boyfriend and I had hopped on the Amtrak from Harrisburg and were heading to a Hippo Campus concert. It was my first gig not by a Christian band, and my first train ride. I sat back in my seat working on homework, trying to chameleon my way into seasoned travelerhood, and to lessen the guilt for skipping three classes.
It was October, and three days earlier, my parents had announced that they would be separating. What had always been crowned home had been suddenly dethroned and given a few days to find a new place to live. I was feeling a bit numb to the news. Ella Frances wrote that “When one is considering the universe, it is important, sensible even, to try and find some balance between laughter and uncontrollable weeping.” So I followed her words and went to a concert, a small act of revolt against a home I could no longer reach.
I kept thinking to myself, “I should be feeling remorse. I should be shut away, poking at a piano or becoming ‘one acquainted with the night’ as Frost might have suggested.” Maybe (definitely) another day I would succumb to such acts. But I wasn’t there yet. For the time being, I would continue to unintentionally embrace the cold leather jacket ahead of me. To be pressed up against so many strangers in the violet light fused the simultaneous feelings of unity and isolation within me, a feeling with which I would soon become intimately acquainted. I was the wasteland among incandescent bodies.
The band pinned a few lyrics to my headspace that night:
“This simple season is all ours.”
But what did I want it to be?
“Wait and see, I’ll be making my own way now. I’ll be making my own way now, to where I’ve got to be.”
But where was I going? In that moment, I had no inclination, but it didn’t really matter. All I cared about was swaying to the music and feeling my boyfriend’s arms safely around me. I was limitless and would experience no collision with sorrow.
The sentiment wouldn’t last. I was soon swept up into a season of sorrow, of feeling no security - desperately trying to uncover some form of comfort. I was under the impression that everything would bounce back, be resilient and supple again in time. When I realized how often I had been obsessively looking into how much it would cost to furnish my own apartment, I began to accept the fact that I was trying to return to my pastoral state, or at least its understudy.
The first time I returned to my childhood home, I felt like a trespasser to my own past. I expected to be surrounded by a grey sky as I walked through parched grass. I imagined entering a frigid home without light, full of dust-covered walls and empty spaces. I imagined a chill running up my spine, then running to vomit. Instead it was warm. Everything just looked smaller, a little more empty and a lot less mine. I found drooping roses that had been left behind and dried up in their vase, as if reciting their own eulogy, saying, “this was a home once.”
Home was peach stained curtains that awoke my slumbering April body at dawn, wriggling my toes in my dew-grazed yard as I captured the sunrise. Home was the collecting of blueberries along waves of hilly landscape in the Appalachian sun, along fragments of Susquehanna streams. Home was herb gardens, church bells, a kitchen on Easter morning. Home was a place I could gather eggs, husk corn, pass a soccer ball barefoot in the yard until my feet beamed like raw salmon.
I’ve painted this image before, at a storytelling competition called “Mosaic” located on my college’s campus. The theme was “home”, and I delivered a free verse poem of my interpretation of home. At the time, I believed that this was a concrete idea. This home that I spoke of would always be home. Tioga Street would remain my Tioga Street.
That’s what I had been ineffectively attempting to mimic this whole time, what I had been lamenting in the poems I was lately writing. I was a shoddy claymaker working with pale illusions. When I was a child, and my mother was instructing me on how to maintain organization, she used to explain that “everything has a place.” Why was I having such a difficult time finding my own now? I had been denying myself the ability to change with my surroundings, causing a dislocated existence. The version of home I was longing after could no longer be habituated.
There is a series of lyrics in the song “A Silent Cause” by The Paper Kites that reads,
“So long to your family home, I wonder if you’ll ever get that feeling back? Your family home”.
So what is my family home?
I discovered the answer suddenly and strangely when I found myself standing in the fish aisle of a Korean market, alone. I stared at the shrink-wrapped seafood wondering how nearly a year could propel me into such contrasting experiences, how I could feel such comfort in a place so foreign to my own experiences. I discovered how to be unexpectedly human sipping on Columbiana in the backseat of a tiny car being steered through the streets of Hackensack - momentarily pausing at a corner store for mango popsicles in the company of friends.
I felt that same freedom as I had at the concert- that I was slowly structuring a fusion of home, an ever-shifting environments for myself. I became a sojourner, caught up in a constant undertaking of the world. I wanted to take up residence in others’ expressions of home, to see the comfort experienced in such varieties. Through doing so, I have been able to recognize that my “family home” has permission to shift, even into something that doesn’t necessarily resemble a physical house. It doesn’t mean that my previous version of home is suddenly null and void. Those same sunrises I photographed weren’t my sunrises anymore. But I could borrow them for a while, so long as I needed them. I can still look back at how I defined home before, still find solace in it, but cannot remain with them perpetually. Sometimes home can be uprooted without a clear direction onward, and it’s up to us to define what we want our next home to be. The most valuable lesson to take along the way is the ability to allow ourselves to be dazzled by the change.
Olivia Bardo is an English and Politics student at Messiah College. She has contributed to The Peregrine Review and won The Academy of American Poets’ Carrie A. Guhl Poetry Prize. She is currently studying abroad at Oxford University.