UNFAMILIAR HOME
hover key words
suburbs, how could I forget the
womb
of manicured lawns,
and promptly scheduled sprinklers. Careful not to disrupt the stage four drought. After
eighteen years I found myself approximately
40,000
feet in the air,
crossing the border between then and now.
For the next four years
curbside couches
and rusted shells
long past inspection,grazing the decrepit infrastructure of a post industrial memory became my
home. Each night the sweet sound of sirens soothed me to sleep.
New found comforts hidden in the most repulsive details. Each stenchful cloud of
skunky smoke was met with an all consuming sense of familiarity. Familiar to
what? Certainly not my home, or at least not the
biblical bubble
of a North Texan suburb. When did that pungent odor become a solace?
In a short span of four years I memorized streets and corners, establishing my
spots in a city that once ceased to exist in the walls of my
cranium
. Pretty soonafter absorbing and logging each new territory, I assembled the scraps of my
former self into a
nest
. A place for my instinctual metamorphosis
to flourish,
and eventually, hatch. Somehow the introduction of a new surrounding resulted in a transformative
response. The magnitude of self reconstruction is almost impossible to notice
in the midst of interacting with new terrains and new characters.
It wasn't until my first semester hiatus that I noticed the presence of change.
The night before my flight home, I was on my evening prowl, seizing the
opportunity of
silent streets
the night before winter break.
Like always
I madesure to put on my winter uniform, as my body still had not fully adjusted to the frigid midwestern winter.
Cocooned
I found myself flat on my back. I was not alone in the dimly lit alley of my freshman
dorm. A mysterious force, also known as black ice, caught me by surprise. There
I was, a sprawled out
sleeping bag
, reflecting on the fact
that I was
no longerthe self, that I knew months prior.
The longer I kept my distance from southern suburbia, my memories archived to the corners of my skull, making room for new logged information. Keeping track of art
supplies and
terrible girlfriends
became the priority. It's fascinating to remember the things we used to want to forget. We can't necessarily forget, we just stop being reminded at some point. It's almost like playing with your
favorite toy
for the last time,
you don't know at that moment
it would be the last.
When we try to forget,
we can't. Lately I've been trying to
remember
.
I can see
the peach printed wallpaper in our old kitchen.
I can see
through the plastic Tupperware
I put on my head
to become the kitchen astronaut. I can feel the pain of stepping on a wasp, beneath my coloring table.
Not only can I remember the sting in my foot, but I can recall a train of thought. When
I was little, and didn't know about the existence of cicadas, I believed their screaming
song to be the sound of heat radiating off the earth. Come to think of it, the echoing
call of
a thousand cicadas
is also my home.