Selah // Something Witty

Though your eyes ask many questions.

Date: 09.15.17 -- Day 54
Music: "When I Reach The Place I'm Going" / Wynonna Judd

What's home? Is it a place? A town? A memory?

I have no idea, to be honest. It's one of those things that I keep coming back to this week, and one of the things that's eluded me most of my life. My hometown is a state - California. That's my opening sales pitch whenever I start a workshop where you get that kind of question. It's easier to say than telling people I have no hometown or a handful of hometowns depending on your preference. Most of my childhood was spent on the road, in one form or another. Countless hours, sometimes days, in the backseat of a some four-door sedan. In that sense, I've never really had a constant or a touchstone to come back to when things got rough.

As I've gotten older, my time staying in one place has lengthened, but that feeling that nothing will remain for long still lingers with me. I still have a few cardboard boxes filled with things from my last move five years ago. It's a peculiar type of mentality. Why unpack when you just have to repack later? Why hang anything on the walls when you're just gonna need to patch those holes later? Why get attached to an apartment when you're going to leave it behind in a year or two? Honestly, I don't know why I'm still set in that mode when I haven't lived that life for a while. Maybe it's too ingrained in my memory to turn it off.

I think the thing that scares me the most is the idea that those roads are my constant. I felt safest there as a kid. Life was chaotic enough when my family stood still. Walls meant fewer places to run and hide. But tires on the pavement meant that there were possibilities as long as there was pavement underneath the tires. I often did homework in the backseat while my mother and I delivered medical reports for my dad before the age of the internet and we were too strapped for cash to hire a service. It was during one of those trips that I saw the prettiest sunset of my life on near barren field when the sun blanketed the sky in golden hues. I slept there in the front when we had to go visit my grandfather in the hospital on weekends after he was diagnosed with cancer or when we'd check on the house bore our name but was no longer ours. The most boring trip was always the one from Kern Valley to San Francisco. Nothing to look at but endless brown hills. The clouds, however, would put on a show if you looked up at just the right time. Driving into Owens Valley was, and remains, a time for existential crisis which can be mimicked by staying at any Best Western hotel. Many a road trip down Lancaster way has convinced me that California City is most likely haunted. Like the entire town is haunted, no joke. Crossing the Bay Bridge into San Francisco is like exhaling normalcy and inhaling the bay saltwater, The City, and all that it entails. The most beautiful and potentially deadly drive remains taking PCH from its southern point to its highest point. It's lovely having the ocean as your wing man. I know all these roads by heart, having driven them multiple times, with a multitude of company. The problem is...you cannot build lasting dreams on the road.

So what is home? If it's a house or some place to set down roots, I haven't found it yet. Maybe it's one of those lifelong pursuits where the journey is more than the destination. I think I'm closer now to that answer now that I'm away from California. But the state will forever be in my bones and on those roads. I can recall them with almost perfect clarity, each ride and each song on the cassette deck. Those roads made me. What they made me into, I don't know. But I imagine when my body breaks down and nearly turns to dust, you'll find bits of that Golden State asphalt floating around in there. Maybe finding home is accepting that as my truth. Or maybe home is still out there and I just need to search a bit longer.