Home, again

Past the farm I half grew up on, across the forest: home where everything was the same. The cat died, but they got another one and named her in memoriam.

She’s the size of my hand. She rips up and down the hill and only stops to observe us, a group of people she has never seen together before. Her sternum is underdeveloped. My grandmother says if she lives to see a year, she’ll live forever.

On the way home my mother says a sort of prayer: God, I hope that cat lives.

The house shows me mercy by remaining the same all these years. The tacky rug, the cracked porcelain sink, the same floorboards creak when stepped on. I want to exist here. It’s not the house, but the memories — the concrete burning the bottoms of our feet when we were kids, picking strawberries from the bush, the rope swing that threw us over the water just enough to have our hearts beating a little too fast. Or it’s not the memories, but the people.

My father goes home where he ran from. No hugs, only handshakes. I hug everyone.

My sister and I sit like dutiful daughters, nieces and grandchildren, but we want to get a running start and jump as far as we can off the dock, to roll backwards down the massive hill and laugh like we used to, and take our cousin’s word as gospel because he’s older, after all, and that’s what you do.

I wonder if my father misses it. Home where he left, home where he rarely returns to. Home where everyone is getting older. I miss it enough for the both of us, but it feels wrong; I miss it in a different way. Merciful house, house filled with missing.

You come home, all hollow and inside out and learn that some things cannot comfort a wound so deep. You come home and the suburbs wait with a mouth wide and inviting (they have been waiting all these years) like something that does not exist when you are not there.

You come home to watch your childhood dog get old, to find the windows closed and the foxes have gone towards something better. You come home and the world holds its breath because you promised you would die here and you left, traitorous and breathing and carrying an ache.

You come home to find nothing tastes the same and the stitches aren’t where you left them. You come home and your little sister is taller than you, and it makes you think you are a shadow, a ghost-thing, that you died there too long ago and everything has grown around your absence.

You come home and the sign that sits on top of the rocks announcing a suburb, that was terribly high and terribly frightening, that you once fell off of and would have sworn you were falling for hours, it’s small and indeterminate and gawking at you because you’re stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, and don’t you know you can’t do that anymore? You’re not a child anymore. If you fell off the sign now, you’d spread your arms and sustain a bruise or two, nothing more. The fall would feel like nothing at all.