Home is a City in Your Mind

I've been told that most people have a construct for home. This idea of a safe harbor in which to dock yourself when the seas of life churn too roughly for your little boat to handle, and that usually, like a harbor, home exists on a physical plane. Perhaps home is a person with kind arms or a little spot under a tree by the river that bisects your hometown, or even, as the saying goes, where your heart is.

What I mean to say is that for me home used to be the clink of my fingers on a computer keyboard, and the sight of ink on my hands. Home felt like that too loud space in my head going quiet as the words to some story or poem fell out of me whole, as if I'd been born with them inscribed somewhere along the left hemisphere of my kidney. Home looked like black letters on a white page, and tasted like 1 AM coffee, and felt those little grace notes in your stomach when you know yes. This. This, I got right. Which is to say, I thought home meant finding a spot inside myself in which I felt whole.

This little spot from which the writing came seemed to be as solid as the earth; the land there was fertile and unending, stable enough to build cities on. So I built on it using the whole of myself, which is perhaps a fancy way of saying, if someone asked me “who are you?” I would've answered “a writer” before anything else.

Perhaps an example is in order. At eighteen, I moved six hundred miles away to go to college in Iowa. This kind of decision, I have been told, is not so normal. Or rather, that perhaps it looks a little like running away. Or that maybe, I could have considered how it would effect the family. But I wanted to be a writer, and in certain circles, Iowa City is considered the best place to do that kind of thing.

My first week in Iowa, my dad asked me if I would miss home. I told him, home was as portable as a slim notebook fit into the pocket of my purse.

At twenty, I learned that like the earth, people too have tectonic regions. Something slipped, some plate moved, and the little spot inside me crumbled. The words stopped coming, and when the words went, they all went. Even the ones in the books I liked to read. The words became like a flame; I couldn't touch them without burning for what I lost.

I was a writer. I'd been writing myself stories since I was six years old, I could barely remember a day I didn't write something—some paragraph or journal entry or poem. Then, for two years: an empty whiteness I didn't know how to fill. No place to come home to.

/

I stopped writing. Okay. Yes. But say instead, the world ended. Say instead, lobotomy.

Say instead, who are you? How did this happen? What are you now?

Ask, how can I forgive myself for this?

/

I don't know what cut that thread in my brain that let the words come out. I don't know what synapsis backfired or why. I wish I did, and I wish I could feel safe in the words that found their way back. But this isn't that kind of story. This is the kind of story where natural catastrophes can happen in the landscape of your mind, and the battleship you built yourself sinks like a dinghy when the storm comes in. This is the kind of story where you admire the rivets as they pop out of the walls.

In those two silent years, music became a kind of talisman that kept me safe from myself. Like if I could just keep listening to the lyrics in the songs, as long as those words didn't hurt me, I could still find my way back. And instead of writing when I went to visit my childhood home, I

played the piano for hours and hours at a time. The feeling of playing the piano—the sound of my nails clicking on the keys, and the empty in my brain while I bent into the notes, and those minor calculations of where to put the crescendos—it was almost like writing again. It was like writing in the way that sometimes you walk into a new place and it smells just like your best friend's house when you were growing up. For just a moment, that smell takes you back there and you forget you haven't spoken to that friend in two years.

I don't know how I lost the words, and I don't know how I found my way back to them, but I do know this: music can find those spaces in you that feel frostbitten and barren, and till the soil in the faith the city can be rebuilt. Music didn't give me a home, but it gave me a yard and many seeds with which to plant myself a garden. Sometimes, a garden is the first step to setting up a city.