Thomas Wolfe said it: "you can never go home again". A boyfriend quoted that to me years ago in college. It must have driven me mad at the time. I hated how he was always quoting Kant or Proust or Heidegger. It made me want to aim a Chemistry textbook squarely at his head. Regardless, I remember this quote. I remember where we were at the time--Walnut Street, night time, summer. I think about it every time I return home, though I've never gotten around to reading the book and despite the fact that I do not know if home is home any longer.
I return bi-annually now, twice as much as I ever have before, to a small island in the Pacific; I return to a patch of land, the mercy of weather, assailing memories, the clutch of everything I left behind. I can never make sense of it. I can never wholly dissect everything out, lay the pieces out before me, give them something like names. I feel it all at once: sadness, joy, pride, shame. The muscle memory of the land returns but slowly now, my family grows older, the children taller, my parents frailer. Somedays everything, everything seems small, and spent. Somedays everything, everything feels exactly right, achingly familiar.
There are sacrifices to living where you are, if not always choices. The singular sacrifices to live in New York City are stark and stern and burdensome. There are times when the numbers add up, when the math makes sense and I can live in the columns--when the light is long and the days are thin, when it is June and the fire flies hang lazy in the air or when the clear distance between me and Manhattan, the span of the East River, is bright enough to read by. But I can see that I am going bankrupt slowly, gradually running aground.
When I go home I begin to try to count the obvious sacrifices to return. I have no scale to weigh and measure the options, the good, the bad, what will be left, what will be gained; I am too taken by my own evolution, how much I have changed, how little the spaces are now to fit into, how unquickly I have grown, the time that has passed.
My niece and my nephew look exactly like my brother and I, running sandy and dirty and wet through the small world of Mokuleia. I watch them from the shore of the house we grew up in, my brother and I, waterlogged in my too-big emotion, watching their lives get bigger before me, clumsy in how far I have gone.
