What’s In A Home
Did you know I was born without any air in my lungs? Did you know me that young?
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In my childhood bedroom, I woke from a nightmare. I always woke from a nightmare. Someone came, or no one came. My bed was in the far right corner, or the close right corner, or centered in between. The walls were cherry blossom or violet or wheat.
Outside the window, a yellow streetlamp glowed like a low-hanging moon. The trees in our yard swayed on their feet, as tired as I was at that hour, held up by their own worries. The shadows slept on the lawn, at their heads a grass green turf, at their heels a stone. I bet the freight train was running through the town, cooing low like a wasted lullaby. A bird called out of a tree, but probably heard no answer.
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Before you hurt me, I had so much beauty. Before I knew any better, everything tasted sweet. I was a child, after all, even bitter vegetables are fun to push around a plate.
I had my father’s cackling laugh, the kind that came straight from his belly and boomed out of his mouth, echoing off the high ceilings in our kitchen. I had his music, oldies, always, only. I knew every word, liked to impress him by singing along. He liked to test me, turn off the radio and sing me a lyric, see if I knew the next words. I had his arms, to toss me in a pool, screaming midair and then underwater. I had his arms, to reach for the books on the highest of my shelves. I had his arms, to carry me sleeping from the car to my room.
I had my mother’s lullabies. Her silliness, her made up words, ridiculous dances. She was the itch in my lungs to make me laugh, always making me laugh. I had so much laughter, I had so much air to breathe out in gasps. I had my mother’s card games and jump rope and bouncing rubber balls. I had her bath time, sudsing my hair with soap and spiking it like a tiny punk rocker. Every summer night, I had ice cream with my mother, maybe every afternoon too. In the winter, I had my mother’s snow men and hot cocoa. When I was sick, I had her honey and lemon, her noodle soup, I had her care. I always had my mother’s care.
After you, I had beauty too, but it was tinged with something darker.
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When I was eleven, I was running away from home. When I was thirteen, I was running away from home. Always waiting to board a Greyhound bound for the city. Knowing the highway would be grey, the cars on the highway would be grey, the swamps along the highway would be grey. Knowing, hoping, the city would be anything but grey. It would be dancing colors, like looking through a plastic prism. I thought, if I go, I’ll feel something better there, something better than home. I stood under the bus shelter and knew I was likely wrong and wondered if leaving was permanent. Could I come back home if the city didn’t save me?
What would it be when I came back to it, took a break from it, let it fester. Would I have forgotten what it was when I left it, ran away from it, kicked the dust at it. Would it be just the same. Shouts venting through my windows, my name bellowing against my shoulders, every night an echo of the last.
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April 1st, my fifth-grade elementary school bathroom, I hid in a grey metal stall. I watched my urine drip out of me like a slow procession of red ants, the color of diluted blood, a burning sensation, I want to go home.
I walked back to class, sat on the edge of my seat, the discomfort overwhelming. My middle was cramping, radiating sharp pain.
I wanted my mother. Hand raised, I asked, Can I go to the nurse.
Teacher, correcting me, May I go to the nurse.
I said, May I go to the nurse?
Teacher, correcting me further, May I go to the nurse…what?
I said, Please. May I go to the nurse, please?
I wanted my mother.
I told the nurse I had a stomachache, omitted everything else, mumbled something about feeling nauseous. I worried she’d think I was faking.
You do look a bit green, the nurse said.
It was my father who came to take me home. He signed a form and took my hand to leave. On our way out of the building, he said, This better not be an April Fools’ joke, and then chuckled at his remark.
My mother beat us home, relieved my father of childcare. I tiptoed between my bedroom and the bathroom, agitated by an urgent need to pee and the inability to do so. More burning, worse. I told my mother. She didn’t understand. She called our neighbor, the mother of my friend Maria. I stood red-faced nearby, listening. She asked if Maria had ever experienced my symptoms. She hadn’t.
Said my mother into the receiver, It sounds like a UTI, but... I didn’t know what a UTI was.
My mother drove me to the pediatrician. A paper sheet crinkled beneath me as I lay down on the exam table. Fear beamed like lightning from my chest into my stomach as the doctor, a man, examined me. My mother and the doctor stepped into the hall, I pulled on my pants. Their voices were hushed, their words barely audible through the cracked door.
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Sometimes I am homesick for a home I did not have. It’s an alternate earth, a completely different universe. You and I never meet, or at least we never meet in a room I can’t remember, and in a way I hate to call “the hurt.”
In this home, my bedroom is just that, a room of my own, and not a place to hide. My bed is not a coffin, not a place I go to die. I make memories in that room, I have girl friends come over and I don’t feel alienated from them, don’t feel the distance of my sadness between us. It’s just puppies and horses and dolphins. It’s just dolls who get married and make families, just eyeshadow from a plastic pastel palette, French braids and fishtails, cheese puffs and diet coke. Just late-night conversations about what we want to be when we grow up, about wanting to grow up, about wanting to keep living and living and living and what we’ll be like when we’re old, silver ladies.
Sure, my bedroom has memories like this. But in another world, there is a room that existed without countless redecorating. A room in which I never tried to change the physical, the external, in the hope of changing the emotional, the internal. A room with walls that stayed blush pink, that I never painted dark, light-sucking purple, then minimalist white, then calming yellow. The paint always dripped and eventually chipped. I hung paintings at two in the morning. In another world, my mother never woke to the sounds of hammering, never came in to warn me, School is at seven. I never said, I’m not going. She never said, Yes, you are. I never slammed the door behind her. My father never shouted, Go to sleep, for God’s sake!
In another world, I never took down the paintings, left holes in the walls, made holes in my stomach. I never stopped eating, or I ate more than a chocolate croissant from the local bakery, more than a fast-food hamburger and a milkshake. Was never prescribed and never took the medicine that crushed my appetite in the first place. Was never prescribed any medicine at all. Never needed it.
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One night, when I was older and lived in the city, I walked by a neighborhood garden, stopped abruptly beside the gate, as if called by a voice inside. I heard crickets. And the chorus of them filled my insides with warm water. I smelled green. Planty, earthy, green. The warm water tumbled over the surface of my face and I pressed my check to a wrought iron bar. Missed home before home was anything other than that safe place where someone would carry me from the car to my bed after an evening out in town or a day at a beach.
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There were fireflies in my backyard. Tell me about a backyard that didn’t have fireflies. I’ve never read of one.
My backyard had fireflies in the summer. The living room had a sliding screen door, leading out to a porch made of wooden slats, which led to a dark green yard in a dark blue night. I never wore shoes in summer. I liked the barefoot feeling of sun-warmed wood, the cool grass compressing beneath the small weight of me. I still like these feelings. Though my soles are softer now, less calloused, more susceptible to splinter and thorn.
My backyard was the safest place I knew, is still the safest place I know. The big oak in the middle of the yard, like a beacon, or an anchor. I’m not sure. Just a god-like pillar in my small acre of earth, cooing, this is home and you are safe, this is home and you are safe, this is home and you are safe. The fireflies shining in harmony.
Mea Cohen’s work has appeared in The Gordon Square Review, OPEN: Journal of Arts and Letters, The Pinch, Passengers Journal, On The Run, and Five on the Fifth. She received an MFA in creative writing and literature from Stony Brook University, where she was a Contributing Editor for The Southampton Review. She is the Founder and Editor of The Palisades Review.