Home is Such a Long Time Away

“...the dark ancestral cave, the womb from which mankind emerged into the light, forever pulls one back - but...you can't go home again...you can't go...back home to the escapes of Time and Memory. You Can't Go Home Again” ― Thomas Wolfe

Have you ever longed to go home? Only, you realize that you are longing for a "Home" impossible to get back to, even though you have traveled the road there a million times? It's etched in your memory, and you can see it so clearly as if you had merely driven into town to run a few errands, came back thirty minutes later, and it was all burned to the ground... a shell of the place you felt so safe growing up, thinking your heart would live there forever, even if you did not. You think that it's okay, we all grow up and leave these places, but you will visit a lot, you'll come back and get your soul refreshed, and you've all the time in the world, because you think Home will always be there for you, waiting for its child to return... but when you do come back, it's nowhere to be found. You feel orphaned.

It's like in "It's a Wonderful Life" when the angel shows George Bailey how the world would be if he'd never existed, and he goes around and recognizes places, but they're not the same places, and nobody knows him. He gets to go back, though. I don't. I don't feel like I belong any place anymore. My Mom's house (my childhood home) is like an empty box with just the same outside, only old now. I don't rest well when I visit like I used to, not since things have changed and my Dad is gone. My marital house feels like a dark, lifeless cave sometimes since my divorce, unless I have visitors, and then it brightens for a short while, then the lights go back down.

Then I am lying alone in the dim light of comfort movies, comedies and music that keeps me going, and I just can't help but look at myself in the mirror, and wonder who is this girl staring back at me, though she still looks nineteen, feels and seems nineteen, she has this "far away" look in her eye that she never had back then. It's like you can see a millennium of hurt and disappointment in the now dull shine behind the green tint of those eyes... and she's singing, very faint and low, and still trying to find some way back Home.