Home (home)

“Home is where you are even when you’re not; where you unbutton whatever is pinching you, loosen whatever is choking you, set down whatever is breaking you, and tell whatever is bothering you. Home is where someone is expecting you. Where your chair, your plate, your bed are kept for you. Where a memory, a plan, a dream, a laugh, or a tear is freely shared with you. Home is where you let up and let down, where you stop hiding and let yourself be found. Where you quit being someone else and are just your needy little old self.” - Edward Frost

I think Edward Frost crawled up inside my heart this week. Because better than I ever could, he has expressed what it means to me to be here. I have unbuttoned, unpinched, unchoked, unbroken and unbothered in these last five days. I have let up, let down and been found. And I think I managed to be awfully needy. Being at Camp EWALU and being in Chicago have unleashed feelings of belonging (and yet not belonging) to a place, memories of homes past, dreams of homes future. My past, present and future converge palpably in this place. I am home now, and I want to stay.

Staying, of course, is not in the cards just now. Plus, I seriously cannot take the heat! My whole system is still a bit shocked at the mugginess of it all. I feel like the world has taken a hot shower, let the bathroom windows steam up, and then blown the hair drier straight into its gaping maw. Even the breeze makes me sweat. I tried to run on Saturday morning, but the combination of thick, moldy air and sleep deprivation made my attempt rate somewhere between extremely pathetic and “you’ve got to be kidding.”

Speaking of sleep deprivation… that’s been one recurring theme these past five days or so. Somehow I kept sleeping at all the times I most wanted to be awake, and waking when the whole world was still sleeping. Some places I managed to sleep:
- In an airplane (but not nearly as much as I should have!)
- At the camp office, on the floor
- In the middle of several conversations I’d rather have been awake for
- In the car, drooling into my shoulder strap
- Through a showing of Garden State, a movie I am certain will join my ranks of “best films ever” as soon as I manage to watch it all through
- Brief incidences of nodding off during a marathon board meeting
- In Grant Park, on a blanket with friends, surrounding by thousands of other young adults, during an open-air showing of Annie Hall

Situations in which I did not manage to sleep so well:
- In a bed
- Anytime after 5 am, despite serious tiredness. There is, however, something extremely peaceful about greeting the dawn (and local wildlife) with a long, leisurely stroll through the camp that was my home for a brief, intense summer.

The things I was looking forward to were wonderful, and the things I was fearing mostly did not rear their heads, and so I leave exhausted, emotional and yet strangely buoyed by my whirlwind adventure. I couldn’t stop the flow of tears this morning as I stood sobbing in the shower, but I couldn’t really understand what was prompting them. There are so many candidates, really, that I couldn’t narrow it down to just one. So I decided to call them cleansing tears and leave it at that. Tonight I leave Home and fly home.