Home

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the word "home" and what it means. My mother is selling her house to my brother. I hate that house, I would never want it, it has bad air if that makes any sense to you. Well of course it wouldn't make sense to you because we don't share the same history. The house makes me sad. It brings up a whole mess of memories that are best kept tucked away. When my mother first mentioned the sale, I wasn't too emotional, it's not like I wanted the house, but a month or so later, (and the sale still hasn't happened, mired down in paperwork I believe), I'm overly emotional about her selling the house. It's not my home, I don't know that I've ever thought of it as home, but it was a "place". A place that contained a little bit of space, that for what it's worth, was mine if only for a little while every few years when I forced myself to go back home. It all hit me hard this afternoon watching the Gilmore Girls. Like Lorelai, I ran away as soon as I could. Not to have a baby, but to just get the hell out of there. I spend most of my life doing everything I can not to go back there. Like Lorelai and Emily, my mom and I have absolutely nothing in common. I was one of those kids that sobbed for hours on end when it finally hit me that I wasn't adopted. That these people that I lived with, I shared their DNA. It was devastating, sometimes that realization is still hard to swallow.

All this emotion is selfish. I always thought that house, the one with the bad air, horrible karma, would always be there to go home too when my heart was in pain or need. Now I don't have a place to run to when the hurt gets to bad. Funny thing is, I never ever run home when life gets hard. I guess it was the knowing that it was there for me. My space. The space where I wrote silly soap operas for Barbie and Ken, where I read stacks of Harlequin romances, where I danced around the bedroom using the knob off my bed as a microphone and pretended to be Dolly Parton or Stevie Nicks, the place where I fell asleep every night to Jackson Browne's The Pretender and Sleeps Dark and Silent Gate.

When I think about "home" today, that house is not the vision I see. What I see is my DH. He's my bestfriend. He's my "home".

So what is the house where all my memories are tucked away? It's not home, probably never has been, I think, it's just a place where I spent a little bit of time. I think I can let it go. It doesn't matter if the bricks and the walls and the rooms no longer contain a little bit of space for me. I have my own space, my own new memories, and a place with air that is not dark and thick and hides a lot unhappiness.