Homesick… For the Future?

I’ve found myself lately thinking: “I’m homesick.”

And then I wonder: Where is home?

It isn’t the house I’m staying in now – a temporary, three-month arrangement for the summer – in the town where my parents grew up. And it’s not for my parents’ house – the house where I grew up, fifteen miles from here – where I haven’t lived in at least six years. And it can’t be for where I just moved from two months ago – 3000 miles away in a shared house where I rented a room for the last two years, which was never meant to be permanent or lasting. And it can’t be for the places I lived before that – even though I do miss little splinters of each place I have lived – the way a handsome man I lived with once would read the paper at the table in the morning when he ate breakfast and shout good morning to me in this jolly way and how I would pretend he wasn’t actually my roommate, but my boyfriend; another place, another state, how the wood in the kitchen would glow in the dying light of evening – how I’d stand in front of the stove, stirring away with the radio on, watching the fireflies come out on the side of the house; the morning in a different apartment when my ex and I woke up to a deer standing in the front of our yard with her baby, before we broke up for the 26th time, and then the 27th.

But none of these places are home.

And so, I’ve realized, with some surprise, that “home” for me has actually become the future.

And reading this post today over at Blaqueer made me think about this idea of where we put our faith: How it’s so easy to place it in the past, willing back that roommate with his newspaper, the perfect angle of the Midwest sunset coming through that particular window four years ago (even though it will never happen in exactly that way again) – while ignoring the future – when the future is actually what we have. It is the past that is the elusive part – the thing we can’t have.

And so, it’s true that I’m homesick for the future. Not for those small glinting splinters within the otherwise shadowy transience of my 20s – not for my imaginary boyfriend roommate; not for that moment of calm with the deer outside the house of breakups, where we argued so loudly and so long that we would forget why we were fighting, not for these streets where my parents cruised as teenagers, the back roads that will always be theirs, but — for roads where they have never driven – roads that will be mine, instead, a different narrative, mapped over different pavement. I’m homesick for the job I don’t start for another three months – the home not built of yelling – a “sickness,” a wishing, a yearning – born from the faith that I have that the best days aren’t behind me, but are still waiting to arrive.

Many people dread turning 30, but I’m welcoming it completely. I don’t want to go backwards. I want to go home – I want to settle in – good and comfortable, basking in the rays of what’s still coming.