Attempts to Escape

Naguib Mahfouz said: "Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease."

Perhaps starting this piece with a quote about home is contrived. But I've always struggled to define it, for myself.

My "hometown" is where I tell people I'm from. But when I tell them about my "hometown", it's actually my second hometown. I don't speak about my first hometown, the one where I'm really "from."

I lived in my first hometown from ages five to eighteen, making it my 'real' hometown. Because those are the years you become a person, right? "High school." "Prom." "Puberty." These might ring a bell for some. For me, they represent that feeling you get when you get an ice cube put down the back of your shirt. And then having to watch the ice melt while you feel the cold wetness of your shirt cling to your body.

My first hometown was a farming town with a top-notch school system, where I graduated number twenty-four in my class of two hundred. It had a "downtown" that consisted of a Dunkin Donuts and CVS and a gas station. It was a plastic bag put over your head; the risk of suffocation was always there, although if you were quick, you could pull it off just in time to see the bored looks of your high school contemporaries.

I don't mention this hometown to anyone because I almost died there. Not of boredom, but of depression. It was a WASP filled wasp nest, and I was the lone wasp who declared I had a mental illness, and was shunned for it. No one wanted anything to do with me. The bored looks of my high school contemporaries turned to pity, and then confusion. I had been so 'normal.' And now? I was asking for the plastic bag.

I'm not proud of who I was. I was learning what it meant to be depressed, and sure, that's hard, but it was also so pathetic. While everyone was doing 'normal' things, I was in therapy, hospitals, doctor's offices. I was stunted, and it was only later, in my "second" hometown, after age eighteen, that I learned what it means to be a human being. And not a corpse, or a wasp.

So, there it is: my initial hometown was a hell hole of sorts, but maybe that's just high school, growing up, etc. When you ask me where I'm from, I'll mention my second hometown, think fleetingly of my real, first hometown, and then smile, content that "home" is no longer somewhere I want to escape from.