So, one day, I opened Facebook to discover that my parents had moved out of state without telling me….a month ago. In one aspect, it was a relief; I don’t speak with my parents due to many reasons and now they were far enough away I didn’t have to worry about accidentally running into them, but it also felt like a security blanket had been ripped out of my arms. I had lived my entire childhood in one house with my parents. It was for this reason that I had sworn off ever returning to my miserable hometown, but after I found out I had nothing to return for, the urge to go back suddenly appeared.
On Thanksgiving weekend, my partner and I travelled there. I said I wanted some kind of closure on the terrible things that had happened to me in that house even though I knew it was unlikely, but I don’t think I entirely believed myself when I said it. I don’t know why I wanted to go back. The whole way there I felt stupid and selfish. Was I just in a fit because my parents hadn’t told me they were moving even though we hadn’t spoken in years? Was I self-sabotaging by picking at an old wound? Most importantly, am I evil for subjecting my partner to the horror of being in Paulding County?
Well, turns out none of those questions matter because my therapist was telling me to make the trip, and I always obey my therapist because I usually don’t know what else to do.
At first, I didn’t see my house and mistook it to be the neighbors. The neighbors house had always been painted a pale tan, but my house was a bright warm yellow sunrise color sitting atop a hill. However, looking at the hill, my eyes didn’t see the familiar yellow. It didn’t see any color at all. But as I expected yellow, my eyes moved on quick from anything that wasn’t that color. As I parked across the street, my brain and eyes began to work together and finally translated the image to me: it was white. My house was white. And my door, while now painted black, was the same door with the same fancy glass oval. As I approached, I realized I wouldn’t ever be able to walk through it again once the massive lock they put on all empty homes became visible. Still, I put my eyes against the decorative oval glass, peering in through the same unfrosted parts that Child Sasha had used to look out.
I had expected a husk, one where things had simply been removed. I did not expect a cleaned husk. I had this strange expectation that, spiritually, one would be able to feel some kind of trauma had taken place there, but with how much I saw had been modified, I doubted that any ghosts could remain attached. Our rustic green chandelier in the dining room had been replaced with some strange metallic pointy contraption with a light bulb at each jutted end, a brutalist piece, sitting in a box of pure white walls and carpet. There had once been ripped green wallpaper that we had tried to pull off ourselves, ripping some of the drywall in the process, but all evidence of it and the damage had completely vanished. The once chipped up railings that I used to dig my fingernails into out of stress showed no indication that anyone had ever touched them before. Everything had been so meticulously cleaned, replaced, and purified as if it was once a crime scene. It had been a crime scene. But I had needed it to stay a crime scene, I had needed to learn more about the crime and now I couldn’t. It was gone. Two decades of my life scrubbed and painted over, fresh for a new imprint, ready to receive new blood.
I walked around back and saw that the large rounded deck that my dad had built himself, a point of pride even once it had begun rotting through, had been replaced with a standard square one whose stairs awkwardly cut into what had been my mother’s herb garden, now a totally dead flower bed. I walked past it quickly towards the pet graveyard. As I stood in front of the lumpy ground, I had a hard time convincing myself that their bodies still lay under my feet. The place did not feel like itself anymore. There were moments where I would look at something–the cheap tan plastic border for the flower garden out front, the lake on the farmers land behind me, the jasmine vines that took over the chain link fence–and know that it had been my home, but then looking up at the pale carcass of a building would instantly remove any sense of familiarity. My hot pink bedroom was likely no longer hot pink and Jamie Muffin’s bones were supposed to be under my feet, but both things were obscured in their own ways, so how could I be sure of any of it? How could I be sure that my bedroom wasn’t still pink? How could I be sure that Jamie Muffin was still buried there?
My partner and I got lunch at a restaurant I used to busk at for college money. He sat across from me and graciously let me have the booth side of the table, as he talked about how he had moved several times as a child. He said he felt weird visiting his old house, seeing new people there and all the changes they did to make it theirs, making it clear it was no longer his. But the big hurdle he explained was that he, and now I, could never walk through our old dwellings to “work through stuff”. Even if we did get a walk-through, would only one walk-through suffice? Would really that be all it took to tidy up our feelings? How many times would someone have to return to a childhood home to successfully move on? How many times do we return to memories in our head and move on from them only to replay them later?
I went back to my actual home in Appalachia that night. When I was four years old, I swore I’d escape to the mountains and get away from all the scary things at home, and I had. Now, I looked around my bedroom at my belongings. I remember having looked at the objects from my parents home as mementos that I had taken on my great escape–my desk, my nightstand, the globe on my shelf, Cottontail the duck from a souvenir shop in Cave Springs–but now I saw them as survivors. By bringing them with me I had facilitated their escape, but not from what I had been escaping from. They had avoided another potentially worse fate: erasure. I worried that the cleanliness I had seen that day had the power to clean the memories that stick with you for a lifetime, that keep impacting you and your relationships and the world and yourself. The kind of cleanliness that makes you question if you’re home. Who knows if there’s anything worse than coming home and not finding the crime scene you were raised in.
As I’ve put distance between myself and the visitation, I realized that fear of forgetting wasn’t a reality. The house it was has never left me. Even though it no longer physically exists, I find it suddenly erected around me when my ceiling fan does the same rhythmic clicking noise that my old one did, when a door slams, when I hear my roommates quickly approach my bedroom. The feeling of it being there isn’t pleasant. It disrupts my life. It’s not healthy to hold on to it. However, wishing it gone feels like destroying a part of myself, which I guess is part of the reason why I wanted the house to stay the same. But the house hasn’t stayed the same, and to be fair, neither have I. I want to return to the scene of the crime, but every day the crime and I take a step away from each other, and now, we’ve both crossed a threshold where the miserable click of the ceiling fan is all I have left of it. And even though I’ve been acting miserable about it right now, I think that in a few years time when I have more of myself built up away from it I’ll look back at on those memories of my old home and feel relief at the sight of the distance.
Don't Wander Alone 