If Only In My Dreams →
(via nogreatillusion)
What is coming home for the holidays for, if not to remind you that home doesn’t really exist anymore? Or, if it does, it is the tiny apartment you have decorated for yourself, with the slanting floors and running toilet and all the dishes in the sink. Coming home, you discover a new homesickness that exhausts you, and spend half the time napping in a twin bed that was never yours. The tree is fake and the fireplace is electric and all the Christmas carols in your ipod couldn’t make it snow this year.
Coming home for the holidays is for torturing yourself over ex-boyfriends. It is the eternal struggle over whether or not to have a drink with someone who knows best how to make you cry and has seen you in the shower with soap in your eyes. It is human to miss being known so well, but you can’t come back to him with all new bruises and expect him to know what to do with you. You wish for letters. It seems tawdry and grossly modern to let someone tell you they still love you over text message.
When you find yourself at your mother’s front door, which is not your front door, and you raise your fist to knock, you wonder what it means to miss so many things that don’t exist anymore. This is how it happens, halfway through your twenties, to know, suddenly and irreversibly, that you are a person who exists despite so many things disappearing. You are here without the house you grew up in. You are here without a boyfriend, or any discernible long-term goals. You are here. Your parents are divorced. Your father brings his girlfriend over. Your mother has a new ring. You are still here, goddamn it. That’s everything. Being here and trying so hard - that’s all of it.
