There's no place...

"There's no place like home." - Dorothy Gale

"Your touch - it calms people. That's a gift from God." - Eugene (Doc Roe)
"No, it's not a gift. God would never give such a painful thing." - Renee (nurse)

I moved around so much, growing up, that I never stayed anywhere long enough for home to take on a geographical meaning.

And my family situation was so problematic that those ties can feel more like chains.

So when I am lonely, or sick, and hear myself say that I want to go home, there isn't a real place on the other end of that phrase.

It's more an idea I carry in my head, a feeling. Some days it looks like an empty cliff face, with nobody around for miles, and a wide plain below that I could swoop over.

Some days it's a fireside, with friends sitting around it, eating something cooked over that fire, or drinking something warmed by it, and most of all, telling each other stories - many of them made up on the spot (as mine always were).

Some days, it's the little house I owned with Boywich, with snow piled up all around it, nearly to the eaves, and a squirrel trying to gnaw his way into my office window upstairs. I hated that squirrel.

When I used to go for walks, I would always come back and pause before going into the house. It looked better from the outside, which is strange, given that we only ever managed to fix up the interior of it, and the outside looked raggedy and unkempt.

But looking in at it lit up, with the soft colors we'd painted it showing through the curtains, and knowing that inside were B. and our cats, and maybe knowing that it was ours in some way that a rented place never is, and maybe knowing that we both had dreams for the place that were never going to be fulfilled...

I don't know. It wasn't my true home either, but it was closer than most.

I guess after a long cold walk it looked to me like the idea of home - cozy, and containing beings I loved - but once inside it was problematic, since Boywich and I were kind of locked into a private hell of our own. Or rather, two private hells and a shared hell.

I've just asked Boywich what he thinks of as home, and I am betting he's going to say, nowhere, but if anywhere, that little house.*

I wonder if it's because home has always had some measure of hell in it that I can't conceive of it as a real place. The only thing that seems safe to me is, as it's always been, my imagination, and so it's there that I really live, in some important way.

There's a cliff, and I have the wings to get myself there whenever I need to. At least I hope I do.

*Later: Yep, Boywich said exactly that.