For Me

Wandering again. It was the end of September and night and an anchor sat on my chest. My nose had been running all day and my throat hurt and I thought my house smelled like rotted leaves but I didn't know if it did or if I was smelling infection. I was walking down a long street near my house and looking into peoples windows from the sidewalk as I passed. I had a fascination with watching people live lives when they thought no one was looking. They were calmer, sloppier, kinder (mostly). They took their coats and shoes off at the door and sat on their couches and with their husbands or wives or children and returned to their ritual. The one they'll look back on when one of them dies. 

Remember when we all used to watch television at night and Dad would fall asleep before the first commercial?

Remember when Charlie used to draw all of those trains and show us every one?

Remember the way Mom used to hum while she cooked?

Remember the good? Remember?

Remember?

The ritual. It wasn't for me, but I thought it was beautiful. I understood it and it isn't to say I didn't want it. It just wasn't for me. 

The air cut through my jacket and into my bones as I walked the uneven and broken sidewalk. I had walked it a thousand times, but I always tripped over the same lifted panel in front of the white house where I once was drunk and fell and knocked a garbage can over, spilling all manner of shit into the road. I assumed every subsequent misstep there was the sidewalk taking revenge. Maybe it was.

I wondered if I should have worn another coat, but it was too late to think too much about it. I was out here, a little colder than I would have liked to have been and a little further from home than I would have liked to have been. I walked in the dark. I didn't understand the word home now. Home was a place you could always return, wasn't it? Isn't that what childhood implied? And television? and family? You could always "go home"? I had lived in the same place for eight years, and less than fifteen people had ever been inside of it and it was my sanctuary. It was the only place I felt comfortable, but I was about to lose it. Maybe voluntarily, maybe not. It depended on how you saw the situation. I walked away from it and thought that maybe I wasn't supposed to have that. Prior to moving out of my mother's house when I was fifteen, I had lived in close to thirty "homes". Shelter from weather. A place to rest for a few months and I thought we were nomads. Settling for a moment, finding work, taking in the sights, moving on. And I thought maybe that bone never left me. I was still nomadic and I was forcing domestication upon myself. It just wasn't for me.

I could pay rent but I didn't want to. I felt disrespected entirely by my landlord, and my house was falling apart to the point that I was embarrassed to have people inside of it. Even people that had been there a thousand times. I would hold the rent until it was all fixed but I knew that meant I was holding the rent until I found somewhere better. I could fight it. Bring it to court. Win. That didn't make sense to me. I hated this house and its ghosts. I didn't want to win this pile of haunted rubble. So I thought I'd abandon it and move on. The house was adorable and fine and with a little work, perfect, but it just wasn't for me. I walked.

I didn't know where I was going.

It was better that way. The dark. The void. The uncertainty.

I don't ever want to know what's for me.

It's better that way.