Home?

After a long trip, I know I am home, but my dreams seem to belie this.  Night after night I dream of my home in Little Neck.  I feel the rug pulling out from under me as a homesick feeling I’ve never had seems to hang on to me.

My dad is alive again, yet dying slowly before my eyes.  As I hug him, he is like a hot furnace, burning with fever even while assuring me he’s all right.  How sad it is to have to let go all over again in dreams. 

On another night, I’m laying in my old backyard in the darkness, just wanting to relish the touch and feel of the cool grass.  The neighbors all still live around the house, our backyards intersecting at different angles.  It feels cozy and familiar.

But then it switches as I wait for a friend who will never emerge from her childhood home.  I feel rejected.  I am alone and lost on the old sidewalk of youth, watching a school bus I never took, pass me by.

The dreams leave me bewildered and a bit depressed.  I have no desire to return “home” to a place which is no longer that.  No one lives there anymore.  It has all gone on without me.

So I deal with a general sadness and wistfulness I can’t put my finger on.  Maybe it’s the fact that the vacation is over, and I feel like it was a whirlwind of driving, eating, meetings and sleep.  I think I was looking to get something more out of it, but what that something is, I don’t know.

Or maybe it’s the fact that my head hurts with its usual certainty, not letting me go.  Back home we are.  The migraines continue.  But I am promising myself that I’ll shake this sadness some how or the other.  Whatever has dug into my subconsciousness feelings of what constitutes home will just have to be evicted. 

Conviction and hope are what is needed.  Depression can just go away and bite it.  I’ve got no time for that.