By Jackson Bliss
When Home is Not a Verb Chart
1.
In 2007, I went back to Traverse City to see Leigh and Barbara, two good friends of mine I hadn’t seen since college. I hadn’t seen Northern Michigan in ten years and hadn’t lived there in seventeen. After a short Amtrak ride from Chicago to Grand Rapids, I took a taxi to the Grand Rapids Inn, located paradoxically in Wyoming, Michigan. Inside my room was a floor dryer blowing on the sopping wet carpet and the unmistakable smell of old water. I called LB from a nearby Pizza Hut and lamented over the cheese I was about to eat and the wet carpet in my motel room. After I returned, I inspected the mattress, the pillowcases, and top sheet for bed bugs, King James bibles, and cum stains (i.e., Americana). I turned on the TV absentmindedly and watched the US team beat up on Venezuela in the FIBA Olympic Qualifiers. As I fell asleep, I suddenly thought, Fuck, I hope it wasn’t the toilet that overflowed on the carpet. I have a history of thinking the absolute worst thoughts before I fall asleep: do I have malaria, are my neighbors serial killers, does she talk with a German accent during sex, did I lock the front door, did I leave the stove on, was that sarcasm, was that shade, will I ever publish a book, and now, does my carpet contain fecal pathogens?
2.
The next morning, I hitched a ride with my friend Angie, who was returning from a wedding down state with Bill (her boyfriend) and Lydia (her daughter). I sat in back with Lydia and told her jokes that didn’t make sense. Lydia kept plopping her feet on my lap, even though Angie told her not to. I bribed Lydia with skittle gum and kid talk, which worked for a while. Halfway to our destination, Angie started speaking to me in French so we could speak freely (and also because that was our thing in college, speaking French, and nothing was more consoling than being able to speak French again after a long and twitchy withdrawal). We caught up on two years of lost time while her boyfriend pretended to read a Stephen King novel in the passenger’s seat, hanging on to our every word. To be honest, it was uncomfortable AF, but every option was flawed in some way. I felt for him. I knew what it was like to be the outsider. There’s nothing shittier in the whole world than meeting someone who knew your partner before you did because their friendship (or whatever the hell it is that they have that threatens you in its vague emotional symmetry) predates you and makes you the youngest person in the room, emotionally speaking. Lydia kept putting her feet on my lap and smacking her gum with not a care in the whole world, even though she got yelled at. I envied her insouciance, which was actually the word that’d come to my head at that moment because of the contact high of speaking French again with my friend who definitely didn’t have enough people to share her love with. Neither did I, honestly.
3.
I walked from Leigh’s house around town and then downtown, all two blocks of it. So much of Traverse City was exactly as I’d remembered it, even though everyone warned me it had changed so much:
- The Boardman River was still placid and brown.
- The town grid was still smaller than a day planner.
- The Park Place Hotel (where I used to play piano at the Top of the Park and get drunk on free scotch) was shorter than I remembered, but still charming.
- Grand Traverse Bay was still hidden behind the streets.
- Paesano’s was still serving the same pizza slices for lunch.
- Glenn Loomis elementary school looked exactly the same and my kindergarten playground was still covered in woodchips and mulch.
- The Thirlby Football Field (where I used to walk in circles with my friends in junior high to talk to girls in the shadows of the stadium) was still surrounded by an ugly industrial metal fence with rusted barbed wire that looked like it belonged in a government waste storage facility. This was the place where I ran into a beautiful Native girl with flirty eyes named N. who was my first crush in 8th grade before she made out with one of my friends and then stood me up after I’d brought her a bear dressed up like a Noir Femme Fatale called Lauren BearCall. Thirlby Field was TC’s public square for teenagers, the place where my friends and I went after smoking weed in a cemetery together, experiencing the merged dilation of drug time and adolescent time, the place where I once watched a high school soccer game on a beautiful fall afternoon with my high school girlfriend (Lupie), suddenly wondering why I’d stopped playing it as a boy and what I was doing back in public school after the refuge I’d found at Interlochen Arts Academy, a school I missed every single day of my Sophomore year.
I walked around Traverse City for hours, replaying my life, remembering every palpitation I felt in the hallways of junior high, remembering every moment of racial alienation, erasure, and suffocation, remembering every microaggression against my obāchan, every racist comment made against Asian and Black and Native people, remembering every moment of intense childhood joy, euphoria, and isolation, every instance of teenage anxiety, infatuation, and betrayal, every adult moment of collapse and estrangement as a mixed-race writer and multicultural, urban liberal. During my visit, stuck in the rabbit hole of time lost and time regained as a full-fledged adult now revisiting the geography of my longing, alienation, and shame, it hit me that the idea of home, like gender, had never been a stable category for me, always shifting, always redefined against my will as my parents moved around the country in search of parallel worlds where they were different people with different partners with different families living in different worlds. Home for my family was a shifting space, it lacked the stability, the love, and the indestructible sense of belonging I wanted. Maybe, this was why I was so terrible at sticking around and defending my mistakes. Maybe, my idealization of stasis was based on my own inability to cultivate it in my own life. Maybe, the idea of home had never been geographical. Maybe, it wasn’t a noun. Maybe, home was something we created with calloused fingertips and utility belts, a feeling we conjugated inside ourselves like irregular verbs for unfinished love poems we were too shy to read out loud. Maybe, home was the blurry storytelling of a too-sweet mojito I had with my friends in LA or a city mural covered in ball bearing raindrops. Maybe, home was the love address of the eyes of the woman I adored, gazing at me in a soft narcotic daze as an IV drip blew away the fire ants in her veins after surgery. Maybe, home was the qi I felt in her pulse as I held her hand. Maybe, home was a narrative vulnerability of the brokenhearted. Maybe, home was the mosaic of my shattered heart as LB sobbed in my arms after baby embryo died and we were forced to say goodbye to the family we never had, her eyes melting in a fondue of lost words and severed worlds. But maybe, home was the cradle of Zoe’s warmth on her pillow and Gogo’s tiny head sleeping in her crouch, maybe it was a perfect late-night drive through Lower Wacker listening to Aqualung or a muted café in Wicker Park where every self-conscious hipster turned into a scruffy blur before our first kiss erased every line of music that came before us.
4.
As LB and I talked about moving to Barcelona or Madrid or Paris or Buenos Aires the following year, our home would not be a fixed or synchronic space in our memory. It couldn’t be a protected space of teenage nostalgia that I held on to like an operatic placeholder. Home was not a pause button or a linear plot line of humble beginnings and urban ascendance. Home didn’t have to be the lake you swam in for first time like a koi or the bed you woke up in after a febrile dream. Home didn’t have to be the emotional GPS of your family drama or the prefab subdivision that drenched you in familiarity. Home didn’t have to be a memory we pinned down with patient and strong arms like trained psychiatric wardens. Home could be the flash and the snare of a perfect thunderstorm outside our window, the primal warmth of our bed that we shared together, the comforting weight and scent of the duvet, a soft cocoon for us in a storm of new beginnings.
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Related Feature: One Question: Jackson Bliss
Jackson Bliss is the winner of the 2020 Noemi Press Award in Prose and the mixed-race/hapa author of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021), Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), and the speculative fiction hypertext, Dukkha, My Love (2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Antioch Review, ZYZZYVA, Longreads, TriQuarterly, Columbia Journal, Kenyon Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Witness, Fiction, Santa Monica Review, Boston Review, Juked, Quarterly West, Arts & Letters, Joyland, Huffington Post UK, The Daily Dot, and Multiethnic Literature in the US, among others. He is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University and lives in LA with his wife and their two fashionably dressed dogs.
Follow him on Twitter and IG: @jacksonbliss. Website: http://www.jacksonbliss.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jacksonbliss Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jacksonbliss
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