One night in winter, I drove home. Except this wasn’t my home anymore—hadn’t been for almost fifteen years. We had moved out right after I turned twelve. Only a total of four years had we lived there.
As I sat in my car, I watched the red and white Christmas lights, blinking across the house’s triangle roofs. One of my favorite trees had its pink flowers replaced with matching lights, wrapped around the bare branches. And although it probably wasn’t meant to be holiday themed, it all matched the deep red door.
The door that had been brown when I lived there. Or… no. It had been white. Right?
A lot had changed in this neighborhood. Some elements stayed the same. The cul-de-sac houses were in the same places, had relatively the same faces.
The local elementary school had the same location, the same name, and largely the same look.
Sometimes I wondered if the people were the same, or did others get forced out like my family? It might not have happened as explicitly, but life changes.
Perhaps everyone there was new.
I didn’t mind what had stayed the same. Some of the changes had my approval, such as the basketball hoop in my old driveway or the two little libraries at the neighbor’s house. (To that day, I still couldn’t comprehend who would willing relinquish their books as a gracious contribution to these outdoor community systems—aside from missionaries hoping to plant their faith into another’s life. Almost any book I got my hands on I kept.)
There were other changes. The local church had changed. In the sense that it didn’t exist anymore. It was Utah County, Utah and somehow a church was removed and not added.
I was mad about it. Mad that a church I didn’t attend, wouldn’t attend if I still lived there—and didn’t even ascribe to the beliefs of anymore—was gone. Demolished and replaced by houses built by a tired architect living like a kid modifying and submitting the same essay he’d written in a family science class years ago.
Kids probably lived in that new neighborhood, but no kids would cut through the church parking lot. They wouldn’t use it as a shortcut to get to the school’s soccer field to cross the grass yard and make it inside before the bell rang. No one would play pickup on the asphalt. No one would use the brick building’s overhang to shelter themselves from the hail and rain, like I had.
I was mad that these tired houses were expensive and driving the prices up. More minorities had probably been driven out. Racial and cultural minorities, social minorities, class minorities. Once upon a time, it wasn’t a rich neighborhood, nor an old neighborhood, nor a new neighborhood filled with cookie cutter houses. It was a nice cul-de-sac in a neighborhood with houses that all varied from one another—in size and style.
They were all worth living in. Loving. Calling home.
Moving so often as a kid left me yearning for a place I couldn’t identify. I didn’t grow up anywhere. I didn’t have childhood friends. I didn’t have a well-known place to return to throughout the years.
Drifting through different places, I felt like a forgettable, abnormal blimp in other’s predictable, consistent lives. By middle school I started to notice how I couldn’t relate to talk of childhood friends, and by high school I couldn’t even relate to talk of any established social dynamics.
Awkwardness fused into my interactions, and I overcompensated with jokes and energetic attitudes, which were labeled as annoying. I became quiet in big groups and loud in small ones.
As a high schooler living in an apartment in a new state, I sometimes looked at photos of that old home. It had the largest backyard I had ever seen, and we must have had money at some point because it had a pool, and surely poor people wouldn’t wager their whole earnings on a house with a pool unless they knew they could afford something so grand.
Other times the house would pop into my mind randomly. I would tell people how special surprises were difficult to keep secret from me, and I’d relay the story of the time my parents tried to pull off my biggest birthday surprise:
They told me my room had a spider infestation (Quelle horreur!), but they were actually transforming it. To their surprise, one day I had an ounce of bravery and peeked into the room. Morbid curiosity drove me to see the bugs. Instead I saw my parents. They were painting my bedroom my favorite color of aqua, nailing cute triangle shelves into a corner and switching out a standard light switch plate for a Paris-themed one. After years of pale yellow walls that I had hated, they gave me the best twelfth birthday surprise.
And then we moved a month later.
As much as I had loved it and wanted to pretend it hadn’t changed, I knew deep down the month we moved was likely the month someone painted over one of the greatest things my parents had done for me.
For years I felt alone about this longing for a place that no longer existed. However, that winter night as I, a person nearing their late 20s, sat in my car, I knew many of my peers had joined me in this limbo of yearning. There were people who grew up with the consistencies I had craved and were relating to that feeling for the first time as an adult: Crying for home and knowing… there really wasn’t one to go back to.
So, what do we do?
I don’t know.
Maybe we preserve our memories by allowing ourselves to pretend for a moment, here and there. Like this…
If I had a home to return to as an adult, it would have been the one I visited that night. We would have never given up our pets, so some type of labs would have greeted me when I entered the door. Maybe one would have escaped like my old dog Millie used to. I would have rolled my eyes and grunted as I ran out to negotiate with its terms of agreement upon return.
Inside I would have felt warm in contrast to the winter air (since this is a made-up world, climate change doesn’t exist and winters in Utah actually get cold). I would have shouted, “I’m here!” By then a cat would have sauntered over and graced me with a greeting.
When I ran up the stairs, maybe another cat would have jumped up and slithered through the posts to say hi. The fur would have felt soft, long, and familiar in my hand.
At the top of the stairs would be a hallway, and at the end of the hallway would be my room. The same room I had since I moved in as a young girl. I’d have some childhood souvenirs like stuffed animals and American Girls dolls. It’d be significantly less than what I had at age eleven, but they would have been donated by choice and intentionality, not force and random selection of others.
I’d drop a bag off in my room and collapse onto my full size bed, which would still kind of feel like a queen to me, and that would mean I was royalty. Then, depending on the day, I’d either do one of two things.
I might breathe in deeply. Release anything tethering me to the outside world. The only things that exist would be in that house.
Or I might take in a swift breath of air and then proceed to cry.
But it wouldn’t matter because either way I would be home with the people I could count on. The place I could always fall back on in the good and hard times.
Pretending doesn’t change my past. It doesn’t change my present or my future. Sometimes it helps me escape, but most importantly, it tells me what I want. Personal desires might seem obvious to some, but many people do not pause to dive deeply into these longings and identify where they come from.
I know the source of mine. At least, some of mine. Having read this, you should know the source of mine.
My past motivates me to figure out what actions I need to take to establish the stability I didn’t grow up with. Many of my goals involve creating roots in a place that my family and I can rely on. If I want to get back a bedroom that’s specifically designed for me, I have to be honest about myself. I have to be honest about what I really care about (because was it really the agua walls?). I have to be honest about where my actions are leading me.
So, sometime I pretend. I remember. And I come back to reality and plan.
That night, before I left the neighborhood I had missed so much, I saw tiny feet dashing up to a door and dropping off goodies on a porch. Children running away and giggling. A white man entering the house a latino family had built and used to own.
Things had changed there. In all our lives, things will continue to change. For good. For bad. For the naggingly neutral.
Maybe I won’t have a dream house with a pool ever again. But I can create a home that I didn’t grow up with. I can create a home my children can come back to. Until one day, they grow up. They go out into the world. And they do the same. Perhaps pretending that the best, blissful things had never changed.
Read MRC 