My bags have been emptied out and my (few) items are on display in my childhood room. I’m honestly proud that I was able to pack so little this time. I try my best to keep the mess that it is to live off the same pieces and makeup bags for almost a month in check. In part, because I don’t want to misplace anything, but mostly because I don’t want pa’ and ma’ to think I am messy.
It had been over a year since I heard the birds that my mom feeds religiously sing in my window at 6 a.m. or the sound of the trees that surround our apartment moving with the breeze.
It had been so long. Too long.
I had been dreaming of what it would feel like to finally hug my parents. Since leaving for college almost ten years ago, I hadn’t felt so eager and nervous to hear the wheels of the plane finally touch the ground and the clapping it unleashes.
Cariño, I’m home.
Home?
And yet, I don’t know how else to describe the feeling I get here, other than lost. It takes one sunset at the beach or one long and disorienting nap in my childhood room to make me feel so utterly misplaced.
I am also not sure if I buy my own story of ‘quality time’ being enough.
There has to be a deep muscle that tears from your heart when you leave where you are from. Even if you wanted to go. Even if you wanted to be (really) far away from it all. Even if you know all that it (really) meant to stay. I still don’t know what to do with the empty feeling I got each and every time I drive home and see the mountains that surround Santiago. I am also not sure if I buy my own story of ‘quality time’ being enough. Trying to constantly pacify my anxiety is part of being a millennial, and ‘having it all’ is the utopia we all know does not exist, and yet, and yet! We are still trying to fabricate somehow.
I’ll never make up for the times my parents needed me and I wasn’t there. I’ll never make up for marriages, divorces, births, and deaths I lived through a screen or a phone call. Even before the pandemic, I navigated defining moments for my family — losing two children, a failing left eye, starting a new venture, and closing a business, just to name a few — from New York and Oakland.
Does making time to watch a random documentary on History Channel with my dad or napping with my mom really make up for it? I can’t honestly say it does.
It’s reconciling with what I have lost forever that I believe will define the next decade of my life and how (and where) I decide to live it. Being forced into the literal corner of the United States for over a year crystallized the choice that I made — I chose a life far away from the two people I love the most in this world. And in a society that is trying to convince us that we can have it all, I would like to scream the fuck we can’t and we won’t.
I’ll never make up for not being home. There, I said it. Here’s to hoping there is peace, somehow, on the other side.
