·Travelogue #30
HOME
"Where is your residence?" asked to police officer while my belongings were displayed on the trunk of his police cruiser. Somewhere in Arizona. I rattled off a few of them, but my thoughts yelled contrary opinions to every stated location. "The last place I was living in was Portland, but that was August. And Key West was for a few weeks--nice weather, but would you count that, and..."
I cut myself off to show the officer that I was exhausted by the endeavor. He was perplexed, asking about my family. "Yeah, I've got family in New York and Illinois, North Carolina and stuff, but, its more of an idea to make it by myself." Sure, play the martyr-angle.
The idea of home staggered me. The revelation had finally dawned, that I was finally homeless. Without a home. The moment your mother warned you about. I'm the one you're mother warned you about. Not because I carried a sleeping back and wore my only change of clothes, but that I had no particular place to latch onto. Nothing physical, but the more thought I had put into it, there never was a home. It could have been snatched out from under me by a whim. Why, Pennsylvania's nice, but what does Maryland hold... and off I'd go, cruising down to Baltimore...
A physical home could have been snatched out by a misstep, overdrafting on a six-pack, and then I'd have to do the frenzied rent-scramble.
Home was motion. Progress. Staying felt deadly. Out of all the previous months, I had only one chance to let my guard down. A beautiful gem of a female in the Bay Area piqued my interest, and within a day, home was finally behind a closed door. She was home, something I had looked for in drug-addled whores with Daddy-complexes. Or, nowhere towns with perpetual rain forecasts. She was home, and it made sense. I recognized the skin on her chest as my own, her exhuberance to be unparalled, our eyebrows matched. The metaphor finally held up, and we shut the door for 4 days straight.
I loved her instantly and that is why I had to leave Berkeley immediately. Just outside of Crockett, CA, on a bridge overlooking San Pablo Bay, for once, The Road lost its appeal. I saw myself as a fool.
The police officer took me further up Interstate 5 in the cold, pouring rain after I had walked several miles of wine country. My eyes swelled up, and I got a pen to jot down words for her in a shitty McDonald further north. I was writing a letter home.
HOME
"Where is your residence?" asked to police officer while my belongings were displayed on the trunk of his police cruiser. Somewhere in Arizona. I rattled off a few of them, but my thoughts yelled contrary opinions to every stated location. "The last place I was living in was Portland, but that was August. And Key West was for a few weeks--nice weather, but would you count that, and..."
I cut myself off to show the officer that I was exhausted by the endeavor. He was perplexed, asking about my family. "Yeah, I've got family in New York and Illinois, North Carolina and stuff, but, its more of an idea to make it by myself." Sure, play the martyr-angle.
The idea of home staggered me. The revelation had finally dawned, that I was finally homeless. Without a home. The moment your mother warned you about. I'm the one you're mother warned you about. Not because I carried a sleeping back and wore my only change of clothes, but that I had no particular place to latch onto. Nothing physical, but the more thought I had put into it, there never was a home. It could have been snatched out from under me by a whim. Why, Pennsylvania's nice, but what does Maryland hold... and off I'd go, cruising down to Baltimore...
A physical home could have been snatched out by a misstep, overdrafting on a six-pack, and then I'd have to do the frenzied rent-scramble.
Home was motion. Progress. Staying felt deadly. Out of all the previous months, I had only one chance to let my guard down. A beautiful gem of a female in the Bay Area piqued my interest, and within a day, home was finally behind a closed door. She was home, something I had looked for in drug-addled whores with Daddy-complexes. Or, nowhere towns with perpetual rain forecasts. She was home, and it made sense. I recognized the skin on her chest as my own, her exhuberance to be unparalled, our eyebrows matched. The metaphor finally held up, and we shut the door for 4 days straight.
I loved her instantly and that is why I had to leave Berkeley immediately. Just outside of Crockett, CA, on a bridge overlooking San Pablo Bay, for once, The Road lost its appeal. I saw myself as a fool.
The police officer took me further up Interstate 5 in the cold, pouring rain after I had walked several miles of wine country. My eyes swelled up, and I got a pen to jot down words for her in a shitty McDonald further north. I was writing a letter home.
