How To Get Home  •   Fiction  •  June 2022 

      ↑ Go for a walk. No intention, no destination; something will simply pull you to move, like a train
along a track, a dull ache inside your chest. The three-story houses you pass and crumbling
cracked sidewalks you scrape your feet against all feel so familiar that they’ve faded to almost
complete invisibility. The trees above feel like they’re closing in on you, wrapping their branches
around the last few traces of sun, quietly choking out daylight. This feeling – inertia and fear
together, something you’re used to curing with a walk – isn’t going away. It’s different this time,
too – it comes from somewhere deeper within you, like the soggy rotten core of a plum. With
each step, you feel uneasy, your body lagging somewhere behind your mind, skin dusted with the
sweat of anxious fatigue.

This place has faded around you in the time you’ve been here. Moments of joy all feel flattened
out like hammered nails – as time has passed, you have been increasingly haunted by the feeling
that you’ve lost something. You’re not sure what – all you know is that there was something
keeping you together before that’s somehow fallen apart, or gone missing. At the grocery store
last week, you had a sudden feeling like your body was floating – right there, in the middle of the
frozen food section, just a few inches above the ground – and even though it wasn’t, not at all,
you couldn’t help but grip your shopping cart tight and make a conscious effort to keep your feet
firmly on the ground. At the park the other day, you noticed an uneasy quiet – all the bugs had
gone silent in the windless grass, the lake was slick and unmoving, the fisherman had abandoned
their rods and had gone off somewhere unknown – the whole world was suddenly soaked in a
presenceless mist, and you thought for a second that you might just dissolve into it, your atoms
mixing and blending into the air, skin and blood and organs all disintegrating into the sky like a sugar
cube in tea.

You walk past all the rusted mailboxes and bike racks, the rain-soaked free piles and sagging
laundry lines; you think any moment you might be carried away in the wind like a thin silk blouse.
You feel almost like you’re a ghost haunting this place – like you left your body elsewhere – or
maybe like your own ghost has been following you around, tugging on your sleeve. The more you
walk, the more the sensation grows. The world around you doesn’t seem to fit right. Find yourself
in front of a bus stop. It’s time – you can tell, as your chest grows tight – you know you have to leave.
You have to go home.

Take the bus to the train station. You used to come and go from here often; now, it’s
overgrown with memory, like a part of nature. Buy a ticket for the next train. Wait until it comes. The
waiting room will be empty, enveloping you in its silence; you’ll start to feel blurry, as if entering a
dream, the only evidence of reality being the electric hum of the vending machines and the
tapping pen of the ticket booth attendant.

When the train comes, get on. It will be filled with the soft glow of the streetlights outside and the
yellow-orange marker lights that blink out your destination, signal fires casting shadows upon the
aged carpets and tattered curtains of the dim cabins. Find a seat that you can settle into like a
stranger’s skin – it will make this easier. It will let you convince yourself this is a simple journey,
one towards comfort, and not a fugued wander towards something long neglected. Lay your head
against the window. Watch the shivering pine trees and little mountaintop houses pass and fade
into the distance. Let your thoughts sway and curve gently along the track.

Things will start to look familiar. You’ll see a house you recognize out the window – a little grey
duplex. When you were ten, your best friend set up all her mother’s antique dolls on the shaggy
beige carpet of the lower unit. You were scared they’d watch you sleep, so you stayed awake and

told stories about things you shouldn’t have known and things that shouldn’t have happened and
you felt cheap in your baggy t-shirt, its red lettering faded pink by the sun. There was nothing
there except for two girls and then twelve more, tiny and porcelain, watching, whispering. Get off
at the next stop.

    → Exit the station. You recognize it, don’t you? You found it on accident (just like most things) one
damp spring afternoon. You were fourteen and you didn’t know where you were going. It
was a stopover, not a destination – a dim train station downtown with a looming, glowing clock
on the far wall. You stood on the cold grey platform as the trains rushed under you. It felt like
time was going to swallow you whole.

      ↑ Begin walking whenever it feels right. Let your body move on its own – don’t think too hard.
Even when your mind fails, your body remembers. As you walk, you’ll begin to recognize street
signs, parking lots, corner stores, names traced into sidewalks; it’ll all look a little different, but
mostly the same, and you’ll feel almost as though you never left. Almost.

      ↑ You’ll know you’re headed in the right direction when you see an overgrown field, lush and green
and sheltered by large, dormant trees, bark tanned to the color of overbaked soda bread. Deep in
your memory, it is much more verdant: you sat once at the center of it all, so small amongst the
bromegrass and brambles there, eating your sack lunch and watching ants and aphids traverse the
dirt and leaves below your feet. The trees gazed down at you, infinite and kind with their leaves
so freshly sprouted and dark they looked wet in the sun, and you felt like nature was holding you
in this moment, gently rocking you to sleep with the sweet song of the earth. You woke up an
hour later with an unfinished sandwich – its porous brown bread and wilting lettuce
half-devoured by ants, swarming together, a thousand tiny humming beings – and a sunburn.

    → Turn right when you see the bench – the one from that summer, endless summers ago. Do you
remember? The stippled shade from the trees above made you and the boy sitting beside you both
look like oil paintings: everything was green and yellow and bright, the warm breeze smelling of
honeysuckle and freshly sliced lemons. You watched the sun shimmer through the leaves and felt
all at once like there was no other moment besides that one. Everything was sparkling and
fluttering, singing, alive, and you felt like you were hovering, like a dragonfly, anxious in midair
but still there, lingering. A woman jogging by stopped to tell you that you looked like you were in
a film. You didn’t know what to do besides smile.

      ↑ Keep going straight until the shimmer of a chain-link fence catches your eye. Let your gaze travel
down to the flat wood wall at the head of a baseball diamond, the pit of dust below raw from too
many springs and summers, bases worn to nothing. You slept here once, a drunken
fifteen-year-old too hazy to go home, streetlights far in the distance, houses and trees above
surrounding you like canyons. A little black cat wandered by, ribs showing through its fur and
eyes flashing in the dark – it wandered close to you, but when you tried to pet it, it swiped at you
and left little red slices in your skin like vents cut into the top of a cherry pie. A boy sat beside
you, a song humming tinny from his phone speakers; there you drifted to sleep, the both of you
slumped against the wall, two strangers convinced they were something else. A moment
overwrought not with desire, but with whatever surrounds it, like the smell of gas that lingers in
the car long after you’ve left the station.

    ← Turn left and walk past houses and parked cars until you reach a bridge. Pause in the middle.
Look below – a little river. Rocks tumbling over. When you were seventeen, just before you left,
you sat on a rock and remembered being a child, stumbling through the gentle current, pants
hiked up to your knees. Tadpoles in a fist. Hair dirty and damp from river water. You were six,
and there was nowhere else to go – and then you were much older, and still, the world felt small.
It was far too long ago. You remember being scared of the rush of the current and the feeling of
little fish biting at your ankles, terrified – no matter how irrational it was – that they might devour
you to the bone. They didn’t.

      ↑ Keep walking, down the willow-lined street that always reminded you of someone, although you
could never remember who – a certain block on a certain street that could really be anywhere in
the world, but for some reason, it was there, and for some reason, so were you. Time always feels
slow here, the air soft and comforting like the lamb’s-ear plants that sprout up each rainy spring,
and you find yourself remembering every passerby you ever wondered about and every stranger
who ever paid you tiny, pristine kindnesses, like holding doors, like gentle compliments. You
remember it with a sense of faint sorrow – all the houses here loomed gracefully, sagging into the
ground with an age that made them look both beautiful and sad, elegant in a fragile way, like
great shreds of delicately woven lace. You used to dream of buying one, fixing it up with baby
blue paint and shiny new windows and filling it with music played too loud and stacks of
written-in books and the smell of cooking herbs – soaking the walls forever in the fragrance of
thyme and coriander – but now, most of them have been torn down or sold off to become
condominiums and you know you’ll never get the chance to even wonder what kind of life you
could have had here. You try to wonder, anyway, but the dream doesn’t come. You mourn this
little maybe-future that you lost.

      ↑ Pass the blue house on the corner, the one with the dusty basement windows – the basement
where you spent two summers languishing. To your sixteen-year-old self, the wood-paneled
walls were like layers of skin, thin and porous, remembering everything. You had to scrape
through them to leave, to dissolve the memories; no exit was ever easily offered. Words hit the
cold linoleum like fragile organs, raw, vulnerable, unappealing; everyone said stupid things. You
always wished there was less excess and more softness, more sweetness on that crackling leather
couch above the blood-laced carpet. Those nights, you always wondered if you should’ve stayed
home – but you never did.

      ↑ Pass the house you never want to remember – thank god, you whisper, thank god, thank god,
thank god, over and over, although it never feels cathartic enough. Your words hang in the air
like the peppery, gamy-smelling smoke from that dark, deep fireplace – it was a place,
red-bricked and hardwood-floored, where you’d spent much more time than you had ever wanted
to, with someone you wanted to love, but never could. You tried, but all their kindnesses were
sharp, like the sparkling red candy apples with razor blades shoved in the center that
neighborhood parents always warned their children about on Halloween. Being here made your
body feel split and dissected, each moment a scalpel in your side. Now, the “for sale” sign hangs
jagged from the bleached-dry lawn – it doesn’t feel enough like all the other endings, but at least
painful things can still be bought and sold. You heard it might be torn down. At least you’ll never
see it from the inside again.

      ↑ Keep walking.

Stop.

Look around – you know where you are, right? Home is the hardest place to let go of. Sometimes,
you still feel splinters from it stuck in your palms. It’s like letting go of a heart; so beautiful, the
drafty old windows that always leaked rain and made the wood trim beneath them rot, the
fluttering leaves and bursting yellow flowers outside that housed infinite bees in an endless hum,
the dust sparkling down from cracks in the ancient ceiling, the uneven wood floors that left
splinters in your feet. Even the summertime fruit flies and the smell of damp floorboards held you
with care. Even the peeling paint and perennial mold felt beautiful. Even the
neighbors, clamoring and cold. Even the memories, so like cavities. You still remember every
dream you had, there in your creaky bedroom, weak-walled and warm. Here’s one: you planted a
circle of sunflowers in the garden, laid down in the middle, and gazed at the sky.

You made it. You’re home. Aren’t you?

Linger here for a moment. Look down at your hands – your bitten-down nails, your scrapes and
papercuts, your flushed skin. Remember when these hands were small and frail. Remember when
the world around you was new and bright. Remember the little life you lived. Remember all the
yous that wandered streets and parkways, faded under the sun, grew out their hair and cut it short
again, gained new wounds and grew scar tissue, grew taller, grew tired. Remember all the places
you lingered and left and people you met and lost and memories you created and passed through.
Remember how terrified you were when it all turned itself inside out and you ran away to new
places, new strangers, new moments. Remember how all that was became all that is and then lost
itself again, over and over.

Remember why you came here. You were searching for something, weren’t you? A perfect place
to return to. A permanent sanctuary. Something warm and eternal – home, something you thought
you could curl up and hide in, something static and endless to escape into. But this place – it’s all
memory now. What you were looking for isn’t here anymore.

Still – you can’t help but shake the feeling that you’ve found it somehow, in some slow, subtle
way, like finding a new freckle after days in the sun. You’ve found no bed to crawl into, no room
that’s been calling your name, no house with home sweet home on the door – but there’s
something else there instead, a new feeling, one that glows from within you like a guiding star.

      ↑ Now keep walking.

      ↑ Past the houses, the bridge, the baseball field; past the park benches, the familiar streets, the bus
stops and alleyways, the neon signs that begin to glimmer as evening sets in. Get back on the
train – the ride might take all night, but you won’t mind. You can sleep on the way, if you want to.
Let train cars and mountain ranges and weary roads take you all the way back to where you
started.

Stand here – look around you. The air is cold and flushes your cheeks with red; your feet are solid
on the ground. Your heart is calm and settled in the warmth of your body; you’re home. You’re
home here, under the sheltering trees; you’re home here, surrounded by the sleeping world, the
neighbors, the bugs, the cats, the crickets. And you were always home – you were home when
you were six, running through rivers and forests; you were home when you were sixteen,
spending nights tracing maps of the blinking city in your mind; you were home when you left for
other places in old mildew-scented cars and air-conditioned buses, home when you found
yourself in dim alleyways that filled with the sound of music coming from open windows above,
home in crowd-filled rooms bathed in purple-and-green light, home in quiet ferry terminals
and ramshackle truck stops and busy shopping malls; home when you ambled past looming
churches that glowed from the inside like candles in jars, home when you brought home cheap
wooden shelves smelling of varnish and filled them with books, home when you sang loud and
off-key at bars surrounded by strangers, home when you danced and laughed in your living room
with friends. And now, you are home still – home as you breathe in the silver air of morning,
home as you watch the ever-returning sun stretch its arms above the horizon, home in the
headlights of passing cars, in the businesses that haven’t opened yet, in the empty streets; you’re
home in the sweet sunlight of the past, the calm air of the present, and the unknown warmth of
the future. You are home. Yes, you are home. You always have been.