you can’t go home again

I discovered, after the fact, that the song is titled “You can’t go Home again”.

hours of orientation prepared me to feel a lot of ways about home. Several charts and a woman with a deep smokers voice and French flair in fashion taught me that when I returned to the US, I might feel strange. Sorry to leave, and dissappointed to be home. Nostaligic for things I could do abroad that I can’t do at home. maybe even divided between my home culture and (insert country of study here).

but… the thing about a home is that you have to belong there.

what do you do when you don’t belong here. or there. or anywhere? how can anywhere be your home when you don’t ever spend more than 4 months in any given place?

Where is my home? The place I grew up and outgrew? The place I’ve loved since I was little, but in which I’ve never actually lived? The place I come back to, but where I have to rebuild my bedroom every time I arrive? Or some place across an ocean that I lived for 3 months – where I was just begining to build the life of a grown-up?

the thing about a home is it’s where all your stuff is.

not your luggage. not your toaster or your shoe trunk or even your stuffed monkey George. It’s the place where all your pieces are. The only problem is, I think I’ve misplaced a few of mine. or placed them, carefully and delicately. or, perhaps they were knocked of the table in the shuffle. maybe someone picked them up, put them on their shelf, and is waiting to put them back with the puzzle to which they belong.

I’ve left them in places and people that make me feel alive. In places and in people that I loved… still love. places where I grew up. people who’ve watched me cry. and whenever I come back to a place I’ve been, people pull out the pieces they’ve been saving for me, wrapped in fleece or satin or a hand-knit-afghan. Little bits of me seem to be scattered all across this state and country and world.

but I’m starting to feel the holes.

“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.” – Samuel Johnson
yours.Rachel

LBN

Well, friends, here we are. Another year begins at Albion College.

Fear not. Even with the loss of our beloved PTM, liberal arts are still at work, students are still over committed, and our racially-unrestful town is still in the middle of a field just beyond that eerie orange light in the nighttime sky.

but Epworth is gone. 3 floors of perfectly good sheet-sign hanging stairwell have been reduced to a mudpuddle. New healthier options have been added to the Eatshop menu. and much of campus has been relandscaped, either by budget or by nature…

yeah. so how about all those storms?

and we’re Juniors.

it’s a strange stage in our college careers, as we have now entered the crust of ‘upper-class-dom’, but we’re not yet close enough to the surface to feel the light of the sun.

it’s a state of perpetuial getting preparation, it would seem. establishing our thesis research, finalizing our majors (and realizing it’s too late to change them), taking the tests and finding the internships we’re counting on to give us some sort of roadsign when we cross infront of Kresge and toss our tassels from one side to the other. The work isn’t getting any easier, and now it’s starting to matter more than ever.

it’s that year that we didn’t ever really expect. Freshman year was epic – as we batted our eyes at boys and tried to remember the nights we couldn’t remember, there wasn’t much time to bother with the future. We were in college now, and that was all that mattered. then, Sophomore year… sucked. again, so caught up in our own state that we couldn’t see five feet or five months ahead of us in anything more than clouds. But, as the wounds scab up we find ourselves left with scrapbooks and the company we made in the trenches. <They, alone, are worth it all> We ended it with resolution. purging.

and now, here we are. not young and not old. not at bottom but not at the top. no longer foolish but heaven knows we are not yet wise.

And we’re looking for something. A Future, a goal, a path. Our Childhood, as well as our Adulthood. a Sign. a Lover. a Home. a Purpose. a Life to call our own.

and the scariest thing is we’ve finally grown up enough to realize how much we still have to grow up. Munching on crunch-wrap-supremes or blaring music in my new car, we discover that we have no idea what we are doing, where we are going, or how the hell to find that something we keep SEARCHING FOR yet can never seem to quite get our hands on.

“The eyes only see what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” – Robertson Davies

yours.Rachel

in other news

I think I may want to live in Chicago one day.

a pretty stone house covered in ivy in the suburbs and a cottage on lake michigan could be quite nice.

join me?

inferno

what is fire?

be careful playing with fire. might get burned.

what does it mean to get burned? what does it look like? smell like? taste like?

but a man can’t live without light. right?

isn’t it strange? we’ll swallowit.breatheit.standuponit.purgeit.and.dive.in.head.first.again. and here we are, standing on our bridge, pointing. they.them.they.them.

what’s yours is yours and mine is mine.

to each his own. … what a nice ring. detached. without investment.

but how much is just smoke?

after all, once I met a boy, and when he pulled out his lighter, I cried. Still, I light candles almost every day.

would we know if the world was on fire?

or if our lives were?

are.

your neighbourhood Baskin-Robbins now carries all 36 flavors of inferno.  Try them today…

God Bless America

Oh say can you see?

by the sun’s setting light.

what so proudly we hail, by the twilight’s last gleaming.

37,000 people filled Comerica Park on Monday evening to do what Americans do best. White collars beside union crests, drowning the workday in beer and greasy food. Cheers and cries of dismay errupted as men in masks threw their hands in the air and others in tight pants slid through the dirt.

< (After they streched themselves on the field that is.) I’ve always found it puzzling how a nation of homophobs takes in stride these tight-pants-ed men mounting eachother, but a little hand-holding ruffles so many feathers. >

There was a race on the big screen – corporate sponsorship in high gear – between a cup of coffee, a bagel, and a doughnut. Dunkin Doughnuts was offering coupons to the section of the stadium that the winning food product reperesented. My dad hollered in my ear as the doughnut pulled ahead…”Eat my dust, bagel and coffee!” The crowd cheered but the game changed as the bagel caught up and crossed the finish line in a flurry of first place pixelated ribbons. My dad slumped back, dismayed. “That doughnut faded.”

Red strings tie more than white leather as the giant mass of people rose and fell in the wave that circled the entirety of the stadium four times before finally fizzling. And as the crowd stood during the seventh inning stretch, a chorus of of less that choral voices filled the air…

Buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks…

<mmmm…delicious capitalism.>

….And it’s root root root for the TIGERS! if they don’t win it’s a shame.

they didn’t win, but it didn’t seem to matter much.

Honey, I’m home…

yours.Rachel

backlogged

“Welcome Home”, said the man in the immigration booth.

it was all coming in bits and pieces. like when the ATM spit out green instead of purple and orange, and the service at Starbucks was terrible. or when the people on the escalator struck up conversation with strangers.

and then, I’m just sitting there in a pile of luggage in the back seat of my favorite old Jeep, watching the traffic and tailights in the tunnel as everything washes over me at once. The music changes as the wind blows red into my wet eyes.

<Don’t mind me, I’m just having a spiritual experience in your back seat…> as. per. usual. and the first of many .

a lot of wind blew through my hair in cars and boats and backyards as it was one of those lovely weekends/days/blurryblocksoftime where the trees breathe green and meteors shoot across star-spangled skies. wrestling my inner Pandora and sexual jokes about boxes, I put muffins in individual tupperwares and sang along to songs that made me think of home, or something like it.

I laughed a little, watching, and wondering whether I was caught up in their world or whether they were caught up in mine. A nod to the muffin-making and bathrobe wearing gentlemen who caught me in limbo.

Thanks for the light.

yours.Rachel

yogurt

well, here we are.

a couple glasses of a sauvignon blanc in an empty kitchen, wishing I could still taste the sea salt on my lips,
and the television is spitting/shitting/ and I’m sitting but not listening.

this is about where I was last night…

when I got the burning desire to go grocery shopping at midnight and I walked through the cool night air looking hopelessly for stars in the cloudy sky until the automatic doors shut behind me and I stood staring at the yogurt isle for fully ten minutes
grocery shopping is always a bit of an existential experience for me. <go figure>

I’m worried about you, he said.

and I tried to turn that into a plea for him to do his laundry, but even after 2 hours it didn’t work.

why are boys so dirty?

in the office

I melted like the ice cream in JCs hand as I sat nibbling on pitta and Simon asked me ‘you alright Rach?” in the British way that means nothing but in the American way that means everything. I needed some sugar, I said, as walked up the stairs, out the door, and bolted down the street, with sunglasses over my eyes collecting water that spashed off their bottom rim when I finally took them off my face…

I’m glad I held off until 2

-5hours makes that about right.

… but it didn’t matter. they were singing ‘young folks’ loudly and badly like they always do and in the corner I could hear him the queen regurgitating the rhetoric I’d fed him but it sounded tinny like the coke can that came crashing to the floor … “does this magazine smell like coke?”… and I couldn’t figured out why they hell they bothered to ask me. Maybe they were just being nice.

Falafel. wrapped in a pitta <with two tts becuase that’s how it is around here> with cucumber yogurt sauce and sprouts and a pink smoothie.

and as the sun came down the light crept in through the crack between my bedroom window curtains that I can never fully close.

we cleared the hurdle, I think. it’s uphil from here.

and as always, I’m miserable at inbetweens.

but

3 days.

good things come in threes.

“Sometimes you’re flush and sometimes you’re bust, and when you’re up, it’s never as good as it seems, and when you’re down, you think you’ll never be up again, but life goes on.” – Blow

yours.Rachel