Home is a place in time

I feel homesick.

Well, truth be told, I don’t actually know what I’m feeling. Homesick, is just the closest feeling that comes to mind.

So that’s what I say: I feel homesick. I want to go home.

But I am home. I’m not in the house I grew up in, but I am in the same town.

The town where the streets are largely the same. There’s the same Taco Bell, the one pizza spot, the small library. The Safeway moved across the street, but that hardly counts as change.

But the more time I spend in my hometown, the more I realize, it’s not even the same town. The demographics. The busyness. The downtown. They’re all very different.

So what do you mean, Dan? What do you mean, you want to go home?

I think I mean that I’m tired. Physically exhausted, but mentally, I can feel my brain reaching its limits. This has happened before, and the effects are uncomfortably familiar: headaches incurable by pain killers, heightened alertness—but slower reaction times, and the real sensation that my skull is closing in on the different parts of my brain.

I want it to stop.

I mean the manipulation. From her. When she tells me that I’m making up stories when I remind her of the times where she isn’t taking good care of herself.

I mean the attacks. “Nobody in this house has any love for me,” used to wreck me and leave me in pieces, for days. Now, it’s more an annoyance in that it ends the conversation. At least, until I turn to my dark, sarcastic, humorous side and fight back with, “Let me guess: Nobody has any sympathy for you either, I’m just trying to control you, and I don’t care at all about you. Also, this is somehow fun for me. Is that right?”

I mean the things that control her, have changed her, or maybe have always been her. The incessant need for self-validation, which prompted her to constantly serve others over the years. The stubbornness, which makes accepting change impossible, but also means she is capable of obedience as a form of love that I could never possibly aspire to. The shoddy memory, which only makes her trust her convictions more, and not less.

Disease, and old age, may make her character impossibly hard to handle. But they are also a part of her. And is not unconditional love, unconditional? In sickness, and in health?

Still, it is a nightmare for me. I want it to stop. But it won’t stop. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to stop. We all die, don’t we? It’s natural. Wired into us. And I don’t know what’s more merciless: our innate refusal to let go of our stage of life, or the diseases that come and rip life from us if we don’t.

Nevertheless, it won’t stop. 

And so I want to go home, I tell myself. But this makes no sense, because home is exactly where I really don’t want to be.

Whenever I embarked on an adventure of any kind—travel, college, taking a new job—I encountered a kind of homesickness, wanting to return to the thing I left. I’ve always dealt with it by pressing on. That’s what you do. You put one foot forward. Focus on what needs to be done. To not miss out on where you are right now, just because you miss whatever it is you left.

Sometimes, the homesickness fades. Sometimes, it doesn’t. And yet you press on. Because that’s the only thing you can do.

But I can feel this feeling, this homesickness, I can feel it stick with me. A piece of gum on your shoe. Remnants of a tootsie roll on your teeth. A scar that just won’t heal.

I want it to end. But I don’t really know what ‘it’ is.

Let me clarify, for myself: I don’t wish for ‘the end.’ I don’t wish for death. Not mine, not anyone’s.

But I do wish for relief.

I wonder if I’m dreaming, and I’m afraid that one day I will wake up. And I’ll realize that so much fo the world has passed me by.

And so I want to go home. But home is nowhere. My literal hometown? The home of my heritage?

When I go back to Hong Kong, which isn’t even home, I just feel a sense of longing. Longing for familiarity, safety, comfort, the things that made my memories there great: friends, laughter, connection.

I wonder if that’s what home is: a longing for the things that made my memories great.

But those things no longer exist there. They were things bound not just a geographic location, but to a point in time. My childhood. Maybe something else.

Anytime I have gone back to Hong Kong, or my hometown, it has never been as great as I remember it. And that’s precisely what makes it special: My memories are rooted in that point in time. They can never really be recreated.

I wonder what I will remember about my time as a caregiver. I wonder if I will remember only the good things, and if I will long for these days, at some point in the future. If I will think of this time, as home.

It’s hard to imagine.

But there is a place and time for all things.

And maybe, even a place and time for home.