Country Roads, Get Me Outta Here

"What do you mean it's never felt like home?" my friend asked, when I told them I was flying east for a few days.

"It never really felt like home," I said. "I just didn't know that until I found somewhere that did."

They didn't say anything for a second. I don't blame them. It's a strange thing to say about the place you grew up, the place your family still lives, the place that is supposed to be the answer whenever someone asks where you're from.

But I meant it. And once I said it out loud, I couldn't un-mean it, though I did expand on it a bit.

And here's something nobody tells you about healing from the inside: it itches.

Not at the beginning, when the wound is still raw and you're too busy bleeding to notice anything else. Later. When the edges have started to close and the new skin is thinner than it should be and your body, in its infinite and occasionally idiotic wisdom, decides the appropriate response to healing is to scratch at it.

You know better. You know exactly what happens if you scratch. You've done this before. You've got light patches of skin from mosquito bites you refused to leave alone. Or at least I do, just look at my California tanned forearms and knees.

And still, your hand moves before your brain can say "stop that you fucking idiot."

That's what going "home" is like for me now. It's not a wound as much as it's a scab. The kind you've had long enough that it's stopped being an emergency and started being a landmark, something you navigate around without thinking, until you're back in the room where it happened and your fingers start moving on their own.

When I landed yesterday, I was carted back to our family residence by my youngest brother. No fanfare, just sarcastic and pointed questions about my life choices and a stop to get ingredients for dinner. Walking through the side door (because who uses a front door around here?) I had to let my eyes adjust to the dim lighting, which is purposeful for HVAC concerns. I walked through the foyer to drop my bags and went to the kitchen and was met with the faint smell of bread and the dry, almost dusty smell of an aging home, and relative silence.

My parents are away until the weekend, my eldest brother is still at work, and grandma is content to hum gospel and scroll through Facebook in her room. It's all so familiar, like I'd been gone a few days instead of a few months, and there's a certain comfort in the lack of change, at least.

But that's the part that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't lived it. Comfort and danger aren't opposites. They can sit in the same chair. They can share a meal. The most familiar rhythm in the world can also be the one most likely to put you back where you started, and it will do it so gently you won't notice until you're checking for blood.

A few years ago I was in India, standing in the campus's kitchen during my service rotation, washing dishes I didn't own with people I'd only known for four days, and some not at all. Someone put on "Take Me Home, Country Roads" from a phone propped against a spice tin, and every person in that kitchen, all of them locals, started singing it like it was a hymn.

Everyone looked at me and smiled and sang along, making every attempt to include me and make me feel at ease, since I was the only international visitor and every other song had been pop songs in Hindi.

I felt something crack open in my chest that I didn't have a name for yet. It took me years to understand what it was. When I think of that place now, I feel homesick. I was free to be myself there. My shoulders weren't around my ears and my jaw wasn't clenched. That's the feeling I associate with "home," and it's been my reference point ever since.

I think about that experience quite a bit now. A song about a specific stretch of West Virginia road helped me understand the difference between familiarity and belonging, that I'd only ever had among strangers, in someone else's kitchen, on the other side of the planet from anywhere I was supposed to call mine. Meanwhile, the actual road, the actual house, the actual zip code I grew up in, has never once made me feel that particular ache. Not really. Not honestly.

Funny how that works. Or not funny. Instructive, maybe. Infuriating, mostly.

While waiting to board the plane for this trip, I had "Lonely Road" playing in my headphones, mgk and Jelly Roll turning exhaustion into something you can sing along to. It felt right for where I was headed. Not the destination. The distance. The specific tiredness of returning to a place that used to fit and doesn't anymore, except when it does, which is somehow worse.

Home, I've decided, was never really about geography for me. It's about where I felt safe enough to exhale. And my baseline for that has been a kitchen in India more than it has ever been the house I grew up in. There's a connected story about the people who feel like home, but that's for another day.

But suffice it to say that the math on any of this isn't simple, and I won't write essays that pretend it is. Trust me, it would be easier to pretend that all of this, who I am and how I experience things, follows a straight line.

Bringing it back, if I stayed here, or came back for good, here's what I'd get:

• My family, close enough to help when they need it, which is a real thing, not a hypothetical.
• A cost of living that wouldn't make me flinch every time I check my bank account.
• Familiarity, which, my scab metaphor aside, is not nothing. It's easier to move through a place you already know than to learn a new one from scratch.

And here's what it would cost me:

• The specific anxiety I only feel in that house, with those dynamics, none of which are anyone's fault exactly and all of which are real.
• There's a real chance that six months in, I'd revert to the version of myself that was a shell of a human. The version of me who accepted neglect and silence as love and commitment.
• Whatever progress I've made in California, the unglamorous, invisible, one-inch-at-a-time forward traction, gone. The community I've started to build for myself.

I love my family. That's not up for debate, and I resent that I have to say it before I say the rest, but I know how this reads if I don't. But love and safety are not interchangeable here, and that's a unique kind of pain. I work hard to have boundaries and have productive conversations with them, but this is something I will spend the rest of my life doing with them.

It's not lost on me that I grew up without community, in a family that wasn't anti-social per se, but certainly insular, only to make community building my life's work. It's strange to know, with total clarity, that being around them for too long undoes personal and professional development I have fought hard for.

The scab doesn't care how well you've healed. It just knows how to fucking itch.

Maybe the question isn't whether home is safe. Maybe it's whether I can tell the difference between comfort and safety before my hand is already moving, before I'm already scratching, before I'm standing in the shower, sucking in air through my teeth as I feel the pain of water on an open wound, wondering how I ended up bleeding again when I swore I was healing.

I don't have a clean answer. I have a plane ticket back to California and a scar that hasn't decided yet if it's finished forming.

But I know one thing for certain: I know what home doesn't feel like. I know this place aint it.

I know what home doesn't feel like because of an experience. A kitchen in India, four days deep with strangers, gave me a feeling I didn't know I was missing until I finally had it.

And, more recently, I know what home doesn't feel like because of a person. Someone who, without trying particularly hard, showed me what it's like to have my shoulders drop and my jaw unclench in real time. Not a memory I keep replaying. Something ongoing.

A place. An experience. A person. Three teachers, three lessons, all pointing at the same thing. Home was never a location. It's what happens in your body when you finally stop bracing for impact.

Which is exactly why I can't go back. Not to the old definition. Not to mistake quiet for peace, or silence for love, or familiar for safe. I know better now. And knowing better, however inconvenient, however itchy, means I don't get to unknow it.