A short time ago, I posted a comment on a page of a comic I've been following. The comic is titled 'Names', and it's part of a series done by   fek involving some of his roleplay characters. It is a beautiful and heart-wrenching story so far, sweetened by a lovely little bit of smut at the end. If you're here because you enjoy my comic, I highly recommend going over and giving this a read, it is well worth your time (and your follows, fek is amazing!)

I'm presently on a crusade to leave a meaningful comment on every page of the current comic, just because I want to show the artist how much I appreciate this particular storyline. But page six really got to me. It touched me in a place I didn't realize was still grieving. It took me two weeks to finally muster up the time and the emotional resources to comment on that one, but I finally just did. And it was so long and detailed and full of my emotions and experiences that I figured it probably qualifies for a meaningful journal entry. With that in mind, I've decided to post it here. Just a little window into a part of what made me me.

I don't know if it will mean anything to any of you. But if it does, then go follow the story that dragged this back out of me. He deserves it.




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Home.

There's a reason most of us tend to think of home as the place where we grew up. Childhood casts a spell on our memory and, barring certain traumas of course, everything feels vibrant and meaningful. It helps if one's childhood home was legitimately beautiful, in which case the grandness of nostalgia is just an embellishment.

But it doesn't have to be.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, in a place called SeaTac, just a mile or two off the edge of Puget Sound. We didn't have money, so my mother, my grandmother and I lived in a somewhat shoddy mobile home park just off the main thoroughfare. It was a poor, run-down part of town, but growing up it was my everything.

The park as a whole was mostly flat, but it was set down in a low valley. The entrance went right down a steep hill, with mobile homes all on one side and blackberry bushes run rampant along the other. And there, right in the middle of the hill, was our house. It wasn't tiny by mobile home standards; three bedroom and two bath, kitchen with an island, quasi-separate living room and den. I still remember every inch of the interior, the only place I've ever lived in for which I can do so, like I was there just yesterday.

On the uphill side, rows of timber beams held up the hillside just before our front door, and a huge fir tree cast shade all along the walkway. Just past that, the neighbors home towered over us like some sort of sentinel. I always found that intimidating. In part because of that, the sun rarely ever got down into the space between our homes, so up against the wall where the concrete ended just past our door, a swatch of horsetails were always growing in the gloom. As a child, I remember thinking they were like a dank, dark forest, and I'd imagine I was some tiny creature lost amidst the trees. Where the sun did reach, on a portion of the upper slope near the back of the house, orange poppies would often bloom to such an extent that they covered the entire hill. They were stunningly beautiful, and I once gave a bouquet of them to my aunt, thinking they were somehow special instead of just a flowering weed.

The downhill side was a different story. There, we had a back porch built by my not-uncle. There was a tree on this side as well, narrow and spindly, evenly spaced between the edge of our porch and the neighbors' place. The branches were just sturdy enough that, as a child, I could stand on them and step across to get onto the neighbors' roof. I used to play around up there, pretending I was a bird or a bat or some roosting gargoyle. At least, I did until I was big enough that my shenanigans damaged the roof, and caused it to leak during the rain. They cut the branches after that.

Between our houses on that side, the steep hill was covered by a rockery. Someone at some point must have kept a succulent plant near there, because out amongst the rocks they grew wild. Every crevice and narrow gap was filled with these tight clusters of little green leafy cups. If the uphill side of my house was a forest, this downwards rocky hill was my desert: dry and harsh and ever exposed to the sun, where only the hardiest green things grew. Nestled back there, too, was the opening to the crawlspace beneath our house, which was relatively massive. My cave, dark and foreboding and full of secrets. I had more than a few clandestine meetings with the neighborhood schoolkids down there.

But it wasn't just the sights and the immediate surroundings that were distinctive. There was the noise as well. Our park sat in the shadow of the SeaTac airport. The planes would take off and land at all hours of the day and night. And they were loud, so loud that when one was flying by you couldn't hear the television or a normal conversation with someone next to you. For a few moments, everything would be lost in the thundering roar, only to fade back in a moment later. But for me, it was so normal I could sleep through it, and during films and shows I'd try to read lips to make out what people were saying. Even now, I miss the sound of the planes.

Up the hill, across the highway, and just down the road on the other side, was my elementary school. So much of what shaped me into who I am happened in those halls or on those grounds. My love of music was born there, my fondness for books and for art. Believe it or not, I still have memories of learning how to read the face of a clock, practicing the alphabet and letters, and feeling very smart because I was the first kid to turn in their addition worksheet (and got them all right). It's also where I learned that I didn't fit in, that I wasn't like other kids my age, but that's a story for a different day.

About two miles down the highway from that was Angle Lake, where I learned to love the water. I spent so many summers jumping off of that dock into the cool blue. There were other lakes and bodies of water in my childhood, but Angle Lake was the first and the best. When I think of a happy place to spend a summer's day, to swim and picnic and roll down a grassy hill, it's there.

It's also where I learned how to dance with fear. Despite my love of water, I do have mild thalassophobia. Always have, always will. I'm fine so long as I can see the bottom, but when the water is murky or I don't know what's down there, deep water is terrifying to me. There are few things in this world as unnerving as seeing streams of sunlight pierce the depths, only to disperse into the blue-green void without illuminating the ground. But one night I snuck into the park long after sundown, and I jumped off the back end of the dock in the pitch black of night and I just sank. And it was terrifying. I did it because it was terrifying, because I wanted to feel the most intense and desperate fear I knew and submit to it. A baptism by depth and darkness. I'd been meaning to try and reach the bottom, but my nerves gave out before I could, and I swam like a madman for the surface. I was never so happy to scrabble back onto the dock.

There was a similar game I'd play when I worked at the airport for a time as a young adult. When I got off shift, it was often dark out, and I'd walk home along some back roads that had industrial buildings on one side and a deep, ominous wood on the other. I used to be scared of the thought of meeting some stranger along that path, far from people and from help. So I started to pretend that I myself was the shadowy, threatening figure skulking along the darkness. And olin my mind, so long as I was a creature of the night, I had nothing to fear.

I only got to do that for a short time, though, maybe a little over a year. We were living on borrowed time; both the city and the airport needed us gone for different reasons, and they'd been squabbling for years over who had to buy us out. I forget who came out on top, but the real went through in 2007, and everyone in our park was notified that we'd be compensated for the value of our homes, and had until a certain date late in the year to move on. My grandma got a really good deal for her mobile home, so we ended up moving out relatively quickly. Mom and grandma took the money they got for grandma's home and put it into a mobile home on property in Oregon, and we've been down here since then.

I went back, a couple of times, just to see the old place. For a little while, the neighborhood still stood, empty save the occasional stream of ants going somewhere. Later on, they ripped out all the houses, left only dirt behind. They didn't touch the streets though, so nowadays the entire area is just ribbons of cracked or broken concrete winding through hills of grass and shrubbery where homes used to be. The last time I was able to go back, I could only find the spot our house once stood because of the tree. They left the big tree behind, the one that grew on the uphill side of our home. I scattered some of my grandma's ashes there. Mom believes that her current mobile home on property that we actually own was grandma's crowning achievement, the home she left behind for us, but it isn't true. She hated the home in Oregon. Her health was already declining even before we moved, and she was never quite the same after we left. That little place in SeaTac was her last and only real home, and she left a part of herself behind there. I left a little more to honor her.

You can't get back there now. Apparently squatters moved in to the empty space and the city didn't like that, so they cordoned off the entire area. You can't even get down the road that used to lead to it now. I wonder if the streets themselves are even still there, or if nature has fully reclaimed my childhood home with grasses and shrubs and blackberry thorns. I guess I'll never know.

They tore out the school, that place that shaped the person I'd grow up into. They did rebuild it, constructed a much more modern edifice in the spot it used to be. It's unrecognizable, may as well be an entirely different school.

The lake's still there, but they tore out the dock. That dock, which enclosed the swimming area on three and a half sides, was a huge part of what have the park its character. It defined a place for us to be, to play, to grow. Without it, it's just water. It doesn't sound like that should be such a big deal, and I guess it really shouldn't be. But it is. The lake doesn't feel at all like the place where I grew up and learned to love the water. It just isn't the same.

Even the sky is wrong. After we left, they began construction of a new light rail service line. In SeaTac, it's up on concrete tressels way up in the air. You have to go up to the top of a tall building just to board and disembark. It's really impressive, you can see it pretty much anywhere along the main highway. And I guess that's what's wrong. It takes up space in the sky where nothing used to be, and because it's intruding in a place my memory says it doesn't belong, it feels garish to me, the art deco style of its terminal building rendered stark and hostile by the mere fact that it is an invader standing over the ruins of my home, just another sign that the world has moved on.

My home is gone. My school is gone, the lake may as well be gone. The entire world that I grew up in, the place that fostered me into who I would become, it's all gone. And in it's place is nothing. I could go to just about any city in any state and find nothing for me there, but it's the only place in all the world where the nothing is so palpably present. I feel alienated and cut off and deeply unwelcome, almost like that entire patch of earth decided in a moment of antipathy to declare me an outcast, my mere presence violating some unspoken exile from a place that once I was able to live and simply be. It isn't home anymore. It's so wholly unhomelike that I don't think it could ever be home again. The nothing that's there now has erased the very concept of home in that place. Home isn't even a ghost; it's moved on from this world, and left nothing of itself behind.

I wonder if Fekkri feels the same. If home is a place that is simply gone. I hope he doesn't. I hope that he's still able to go there in his dreams, and feel there's something to return to. The alternative is...awful.

...

And now I'm crying again. Thanks, fek.