Can We Ever Go Home Again? The First Time I Went Back Home

Can one ever go home again?

"It's a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realized what's changed is you." -F. Scott Fitzgerald

I left the country of my birth when I was young.

I spent one year in Antigua, West Indies with three aunts and two uncles who lived there at the time.

I had had the bit between my teeth for some time after school ended.

Like many youths, I could not wait to spread my wings.

My mother finally relented, booked me a ticket, and off I went.

I have never looked back

Playing in the sand

I doodled in Antigua for one year, did some island hopping, had some fun.

Though it was good, my need for movement was never satiated.

The Caribbean flaunts its beauty in careless abandon, it was magical, but some key element was always missing.

I was restless.

I found the islands too small, too stifling, a space not able to fulfill or contain me.

My soul was seeking its place.

On a cellular level, I knew it was not my home. The same restless yearning I'd always felt in the country of my birth.

The knowledge that I was not at home there.

I understood this when I was a mere girl forever watching the skies and dreaming of leaving.

It was not the place where I was meant to be. It never felt like home to me.

Towards my dreams

One year later I landed at JFK.

I instantly knew I had come home. This was where I was born to be. That feeling still remains.

I settled into my life as easily as a hand fits into a well-worn glove.

Though life had many challenges, I loved every minute of it, I still do.

The young years passed, and before I knew it, fifteen years flew by before I would make the journey back to my native land.

I was filled with excitement, it would be my first trip back.

I was also taking my two children with me.

My excitement was palpable. I thought of the people I would see and the dishes I would eat.

The trip back 

We landed at the airport and I was at a loss.

The memories I had clung to were not the images before my eyes.

Everything seemed so much smaller, older, dirtier than I remembered.

Was it really smaller or I had grown taller?

I was seeing everything through the eyes of an adult, and an adult who lived in New York.

Not too many places can live up to a comparison with NY.

On the way to my home village, I constantly kept asking my uncle, "where is this?" "What is that".

I felt like a child on their first trip and not one thing was familiar to me.

Had I gone there by myself I would have been lost.

When we got to the village I grew up in, I did not even know it.

Nothing was as I remembered

The house I spent my formative years in no longer seemed like home.

The people living there were my relatives, but I did not really belong to them or this world anymore.

After the initial excitement wore off, I felt like a fraud.

I knew I should be happy and I was, but my happiness was tempered with feelings of being lost and of discomfort.

It was difficult to relate to those with whom I once had such close relationships.

My time ended and I returned to the US a bit perplexed.

Visiting home

Since that first time, I have returned many times.

I have learned to relax my expectations and just go where the journey takes me.

I have since built a home there so that we can be a bit more at ease.

A place where we can leave our things and find them when we return.

My own space where I feel most comfortable.

I am not one who feels at home in spaces that are not mine.

Though I am always happy to go. I am just as happy to leave.

I love my relatives, I love the country that gave me birth.

But I have often wondered if one can ever really ever go back home?

Have I grown too much?

Have I become too different? Difficult somehow?

Did the new world show me too many things, good and bad?

Why is so difficult to relate with the people I once knew there?

To be perfectly honest, we are strangers. I no longer know them and they never really got to know me.

For I was a child when I left, still growing into myself. I was still in my chrysalis and had not yet emerged into a butterfly.

How could we relate without knowledge of each other?

While I am growing and evolving, so are they.

They remembered me as the child I once was, now they often found it confusing to reconcile the woman I was.

A woman who had strong ideas about what was right and what was wrong.

To make matters more confounding, I was saying them out loud.

I was shaking up the order of things.

To the shock and chagrin of the folks who knew me a shy and quiet child.

They would look at me with disapproval etched on their faces.

Back home

I have learned to be more gentle with my say and as I age I am learning to just keep my peace in silence where once I needed to have my opinion heard.

I am not the keeper of the universe, it is not my job to solve the problems of the world. 

All the things I disagree with should not always leave my head.

In the name of peace, silence can be a friend.

So now I smile and enjoy time with the people I love, then I pack my bags and return to this life. 

The writing life.

I compartmentalize the ways I relate. 

I am different in the place that is my home from the space that gave me flight.

And in so doing, I can return home.

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A version originally posted @https://medium.com/@justpene50