I drink sangria in the house that is not my home. I feel the weight of life like gangster’s blocks upon me. I miss my daughter like a piece of my soul has flown, and I wonder if ever life will be other than this. I never have sought ease, nor even that ‘quick way’ of things — taking in every moment, a care to think, to reflect, to consecrate my doing as the thanks it is to whatever force placed me here. I have often said that I think too much and perhaps that is the matter, the problem, the reason I cannot find contentment in things… cursed as I am to contemplate always the infinite tomorrow, the road untaken, the possibility unexplored and feel somehow regretful that I am given but one set of feet to trod life’s path.
Sometimes I think there is no real happiness to be had in life, merely moments of seeing it, glimmering like the last flash before sunset… beckoning and promising things I can only barely comprehend, and somehow convincing me that there is meaning and purpose and that one day I too, will see the beauteous place, that I will walk in its meadow and breath it’s heady scent and know from ears to toenails that *this* is the feeling all of what has gone before required.
I spend my life in morose introspection, flashes of thought comfort, bewilder, kindle hope and then — rush away like shadows before the light… leaving me blinking owlishly, taken by surprise, stunned by unexpected brilliance that is not so much wonderous as painful… yet another flash upon a retina weary and all but scarred. I curl into myself with whispers of conviction… a desparate litany of so many things that come to a total of ‘this too shall pass’ and hope against weary hope their passing brings better than this feeling of not-quite-fulfilled, of emptiness yet unmet, of alienation and apartness.
I have recently discovered the truth of ‘home’… and realized how little it embraces four walls, a roof, the right picture hung in just the right place, or a color scheme… or a favorite rug. Home is the feeling of all things being as they should be… in that moment, with those people, a place and time wherein one can breath full and deep and take in nothing but the sense of rightness that means alignment. It is ironic, how many years I have spent looking for home only to find it lies not without, but within. Perhaps to add to this the realization that home means a place of attachment or a feeling of completeness that can never be had in a color or a floorplan.
I have been more at home in that muddy dugout, in the corner of a hovel, in the sweaty arms of a stranger than ever in that building for which I strained and then, lost. I have been more complete in the smile of my daughter, in the sound of her laughter, in the certainty of her existance than ever upon some lofty bed.
She wrote to me that ‘we are one’ and that, for all the material things she has, the thing she misses most is my hug. I weep for all the hugs I cannot give her… these past few months, an amputation of my spirit from itself. I never thought I could be more lost than I am in this moment, as the rain falls and I sit here… eyes closed and typing blind, but with an ever-increasing certainty… my fingers as at home upon this keyboard as I am within her sight, or she in mine. I am lonely for the ways our family was strong… and am weaker every hour we are apart. And I curse the life that brings the necessity for such things, that the nourishment of home is denied us.
My eyes are tearful and stinging and my body runs with the water they are too small and pitiful to express… and eight hundred and forty miles is too long a distance to hear her laughter… or to give her my love. I want to go home… to the place where chocolate satin hair and sherry-colored eyes live… where the music of her laughter and the delight of her exploration of life reminds me of all the reasons why I am forgiven and my mistakes, redeemed.
It is a cold and rainy Monday and I am missing her, my contentment, my reason, my home.