Coming Home

I came back from Siberia as a visitor to my own home. Three months earlier, just as the plane was about to take off from Moscow to Ulan Ude, in the province of Buryatia, I spoke to my mother by cell phone. She said something I had anticipated hearing for years, almost every time she called: granddaddy passed away. Just like that. I never imagined that a day I always imagined was happening just as I was going the farthest away I could ever imagine. Sitting there on the icy tarmac that night, staring numbly at the wing in shining in the plane’s flood lights, I realized things were changing, and just how little I could appreciate how much they were changing. I knew that after he died, my mother’s home (where he lived), my whole childhood of Christmases in the living room surrounded around him, of living amidst a 60’s ensemble of zebra patterned and wicker furniture (I imagined he and his wife brought these back from their brief life in Cuba, where my mother was born), I knew all of these would be different. Despite the distance between me and my grandfather, with him gone, these trappings of home, whatever that is, wouldn’t ring right anymore. And I wouldn’t just be coming back to his empty chair in the library, where he would sit for hours meditating in front of every variation of evening TV show (news, entertainment, game, law, order), I would be coming back from a completely new direction. When I returned home, it would be the future. And home being New York, where the only constant is change, where mine and so many others would quietly undergo seasons of emotions, the future would be especially distant from the present.

There was no turning back, and there was no going home. There was using clichés. I was a stranger in my own home. Rather, my home was a stranger to me. Rather, homes. Some background: My father’s home is a veritable wonder cabinet slash museum slash garbage heap of objects meant in some way to remind us of our past, to lazily shove back the onslaught of some destructive future or loss (is this the best response to late late capitalism we Americans could come up with, this hording of confusing, otherwise value-less goods, piles of pathetic but somehow important things that only my father and I would save from the quiet waste of the landfill?), a simple immigrant-born saving instinct, a pathological demonstration against wastefulness. The things had gathered on the shores of my room like they had never before. Like the slew of cranky adopting parents I made my peace with on the plane over, like CNN international with its minute long explications of the AIDS crisis in India, it was another rude awakening. Look at your life, Alex. I could hear a more sinister David Byrne whispering in my ear as I stood in the middle of the wreckage (“how did I get here”), evidence of a four year stint in university and the intentional failure of some attempt to gather them into a time capsule, a devotional monument, a pyre. My trip, my desire to leave so quickly after the summer was as much a removal as it was an escape from the lovely, confusing mess of college--one I dreamed of as a perpetual collapse of my dorm room floorboards along with all the stuff that gathered over four years--the trash, the trash, the thoughts, the things, the thing.

more to come ??