Table of Contents
Homesick
“What do you mean you never learned how to ride a bike?” Every time I hear those words, I can’t believe how not being able to ride a bike can be so shocking to people. The answer is always quite simple — no one taught me. My mother is a chronic “busy-doer.” For inexplicable reasons, she never seems to be home; she always finds an excuse to leave. My father fixates on his ambition; he only feels alive chasing a dream, always preoccupied with work. My distant brothers moved out right after I turned four. I suffered from incurable introversion and never made any neighborhood friends. So, who was going to teach me how to ride a bike?
Growing up, my house always seemed vacant. The bare, antiquated hardwood floors and towering ceilings meant endless echoes reminding me that no one was home. The inside was full of embellished couches, ornate cutlery, and wine-colored walls. My mother did a remarkable job of keeping our house perfectly pristine. Nothing distracted from its picturesque appearance. She made sure there were no children’s paintings, toys, or bikes in sight. No matter how fanciful, our house could never escape its surroundings. When I peeked through the windows, I saw dilapidated buildings and abandoned smoke-colored factories everywhere. My mother couldn’t tidy up everything. When the windows were open, the despondent air of the city drifted through the cracks.
On the rare occasions I did leave my house, I walked through barren streets of tattered tenements and stared at forgotten mills beyond the horizon — constant reminders of what was left behind. The skies looked gray even when they weren’t, and the presence of the ocean followed me everywhere. Beyond the mills of my hometown there flows an aimless river that pays no attention to time, drifting as it did long before hope left the city. Here, at home, there is no escape from desolation.
When I repainted my room at eleven, I chose the color yellow thinking it would be my warm companion. Instead, the walls told delusions concealing an ache (my house was far too large for a lonely eleven-year-old girl). The saccharine scent of my mother’s cinnamon candles and the sympathetic fireside under the chimney almost tricked me into believing I was home. Sometimes, the familiarity of the hollowness would comfort me. Yet, the solitude always came to remind me that I did not belong. Where does one find a home in a place devoid of dependability?
The emptiness of my house made me desperate to find friends at school, but fitting in turned out to be impossible. Being both eccentric and shy meant relentlessly getting branded as “the weird girl” and consequently failing to make friends. Countless times sitting alone at lunch became seared into my memory along with a poignant longing to belong. School used to feel like home, but pain can easily turn a home into a foreign place. Nothing can make a child yearn for refuge more than feeling like an outsider.
After years spent pining for an elusive home, I eventually found glimpses of sanctuary through a simpler solace. Thus came the birth of my fifth-grade diary:
I feel alone. Very very very very alone. I am too old for imaginary friends now. My mom tells me to grow up. She says I’m too clingy. I don’t want to feel like this. I wish I lived somewhere else.
Even without knowing how to express my loneliness, writing in and of itself brought me a consolation that allowed me to momentarily transcend my surroundings.
I was thirteen when I transferred to my sixth middle school in three years. After failing to make friends once again, my parents pulled me out of school altogether. That same year, my mother and I moved across the country to an apartment without my father. I left my yellow walls for alien ones. Our old house became even more vacant as the years went on. After we left, my father lived there all alone. Fifteen-hundred miles away from my house, I grabbed my pen and wrote “The Emptiness of Grief”:
Seeing children with their fathers leaves an emptiness in me I forgot existed. He’s not gone, but he’s nowhere to be found. I can’t stand seeing stability. Seeing friends giggling or a family bonding breaks my heart. I miss my father, but not my house. I don’t want to go home, but I don’t want to stay here.
I explored the intimacy between my mind and the paper encompassing the emotions I refused to accept. I separated myself from the entropy around me through forming sentences. The pen strokes created a palpable bond that reminded me I still exist. Unable to afford a new house, my mother and I constantly moved from apartment to apartment like nomads, only ever ephemerally belonging. As I grew older, I began to mourn the loss of my childhood and the absence of a home. I constantly searched to understand the inexplicable loneliness inside me. Past midnight at sixteen, I typed “My Mother’s Embrace”:
I vaguely remember what her love feels like. These days, I only seem to disappoint her. All that is left is an eternal longing to go home, to feel her divine protection. I wish I felt safe in her arms — I would do anything to feel it again. I mourn my mother, my father, and my childhood. Isn’t time supposed to be kind to grief? I yearn to feel the intimacy of her embrace again. I am homesick for love.
At seventeen, I moved back to my vacant house nestled in between those gloomy, dying mills. After years of feeling adrift, I expected to feel home again. My father let the house fall apart and decay. The once polished hardwood floors are now buried in dust and dead moths. The old-fashioned grandfather clock that listened to the silence of our house is now broken. Only vestiges of discord and despondency remain. I have no endearing memories; I only remember never belonging here. I wrote:
I thought that I would feel differently, perhaps tenderly nostalgic. Instead, I feel lost. The only warmth here turned cold with waves of lonely memories. The clock no longer ticks, my walls are no longer yellow, I am no longer completely alone. Yet, the dissonance between my memories and my present self proves that this will never be my home.
After moving back to the city, back in with my father, back to that house, I realized that I could live with the dissatisfaction of never finding a physical place I feel deeply connected to. I do not need to know how to ride a bike to feel content. I do not need to paint my walls yellow to feel warm. I do not need a traditional childhood to feel happy. A home does not have to be a physical place. At eighteen, I write:
I long for a home, somewhere to belong, a spiritual sanctuary. Perhaps through my pursuit, I found what I was searching for. Translating my thoughts into language makes me feel content. The bond between my mind and the paper makes me feel safe. Emotional expression feels warm. Words are my impenetrable shelter.
My life has been anything but stable. Loneliness feels inevitable.
Yet, when my hands translate my mind into words, I no longer feel homesick.
At eighteen, I discovered that:
My home is, and has always been, writing.
I live on paper, and exist through words.
Ava Linda Feliz-Sutter 