Home

Home.

It's Andrew and Ellen, Lauren and Evan, Daniel and Mom. It's nothing too special, but I miss it all the more for that... Because here, where everyone and everything is supposed to be so remarkable, where the sunlight of the outer world limns everything in a light I never wanted to know, where I forget myself everyday in the cool, gray smudges of time that I have felt so clearly, so eagerly but never to the fullest.

Home.

It's within sight. Just a few more days until I see Tennessee's winter, the one I grew up with, the one that rocked me gently through each January night, the rime of frost always waiting patiently each morning for my footstep. Why should it feel so foreign now? I hope not. I hope it feels like I'm me again, like I can read and be at peace and when I'm upset, just get in the car and drive, drive down Kingston pike at 70 miles an hour, past Old Stage where Andrew lives, past Fox Den Country club and the new Kroger, past the school atop the hill, the track where I lay on my belly and listened to Nathan chortle, the China Pearl restaurant where I went for prom that one year, with Lauren and my white wayfarers. I'll drive until i'm out of Farragut, but still in my town, I'll drive through Bearden and Cedar Bluff, all these names of places I wish I had never outgrown. I'll drive to downtown, UTK, where Ellen goes to school, where I raised Arabidopsis in a lab and held signs every November for Buddy's Race for the Cure. I'll climb to the apex of the Sun Sphere and look down at my world, my home....

Home.

It's too small for me now.

Home.

I am going there, soon, but it won't be for long. I'll eat at Wild Wings and Ellen's house and see all the kids I knew so well just a few months ago. But I won't be real, anymore I don't think. I've become one of the haughty graduated Chinese school kids, the kids like Sarah and Beth and Charles that I idolized growing up. I'll go to the Chinese parties with mom and dad, wearing the clothes I pick out of thrift stores and pocket discreetly at Urban. The younger kids will look at me and wonder how Harvard is. They'll wonder what it would be like to do that, to fulfill that particular dream. It sounds conceited, but I know they respect me. I embody what their parents have crafted their lives to be about. And I'll never tell them this but it's false, all of this, this amorphous thing that somehow became my life. I'll never tell them that a dream is only beautiful when it's untenable, that Harvard sounds so much better when it's just in your head rather than actually in your life.

Home.

It will come and save me from here, this place that I sorta, kinda want to love.

Home.

I'll breathe you in. You never really did play fair.