Homecoming

I am coming home again. I want to shout it to the stars: I am going home, stars! Back to where I belong and where people love me and where right now at this very moment they are telling each other, I can't wait until Jess arrives. It's true. This really does happen. For the most part they are my family and thus obliged to such gawdy shows of affection, but a healthy sprinkling of them are no blood relations at all and they just love me because I am me and because we have a common history and because we connect on some level and because I take up precisely this particular space in the universe that is my body and soul and whatever brilliant mucus-lined membrane keeps the two of them connected. I am coming home to you now!

Now: well, specifically, in 60 hours. Two days and one night, and then I am outta here for two weeks of homecoming and belonging and interacting and sleeping in a house where other people are also sleeping and arriving at a place where someone is waiting for me. Mattering, on a fundamental level, in the daily lives of other people. I need this so much.

Again.

It seems like just weeks ago that I was soliloquizing about my tender, trampled soul and its need for the companionship of my mother ship, the culture that birthed me and imbued me with my stereotypes and my entitlements and my skewed perceptions. And here I am again, making like my totally blessed life isn't good enough and I deserve more.

Partly I am pouring out my heart here, and yet objectively, my ingratitude disgusts even me.

Sometimes the Happy blazes in for a while, and I embrace it and make a pot of tea and put out the guest towels (and you rejoice with me, bless your hearts), but the rest of the time I spend living my life here in the fog of not mattering, wearing a path between my humdrum office and my joyless apartment, the grocery store and the bank and the bakery where I am a nameless face, only marginally more interesting due to the grammatical errors and subtle hesitations.

The internet is a privilege and a modern miracle and most of the time I force myself to be properly grateful that it buttresses my existence. If I'm honest, if it weren't for the internet (read: YOU) I'd have given up months ago and just come home for good, screw the consequences. But for all their blessings, the electronic media put a layer of anonymity between me and the immediacy of human contact. They shield me from the worst emotions but also desensitize the best ones. You can't get your primary emotional nourishment from a whirring, rattling hunk of tin with a keyboard attached, no matter how great the intentions are. It's like trying to breathe through a straw. You get just enough air to keep you hoping, but eventually you pass out for sheer lack of oxygen.

Like last time and the time before and the time before that, I am pinning all my short-term hopes on there. I am constructing a reality of complex expectations and hopes and dear god, I pray that I am not setting myself up for a fall. There can't be the utopia it's become in my fevered soul. But seriously, these last trips home have been that. I have been refreshed and my tank has been filled and I have felt like myself again. Is it too much to hope for a repeat performance?