Almost home

By Lily Kim

Home is deep diving into a memory, vibrant yet distant, grasping at the feeling until it slips away like water. This feeling becomes an imprint, that weaves itself through the tendrils of the many moments that make up our lives.

I once had a conversation with a gray haired woman on a bus in Michigan about how we all began as aquatic apes, seal-like mammals that migrated from place to place but never left their chosen pods. The woman stared into my eyes with an intensity of a grounded angel, smelling of stale beer and the must of her wax coat. I was 14 and my parents were separating for the second time. I was in the throws of first love and had just got my drivers license.

“Do you think we can bring our homes with us?” I asked my strange bus companion.
Her bright eyes gleamed as a long dirty fingernail pushed the button. She laughed as she picked up the 3 shopping bags that held her life and walked out onto the busy street, never looking back.

As a child we moved often, taken from place to place with the promise of new beginnings and the joyous independence of picking out paint that would deck the walls of our very own bedrooms. As we drove to an airport or cross country to our new home, I would gaze out of the window, eyes glazed soaking up memories. The glass would become a cinema screen of our lives, faces and objects and words of the past mixing in with what I had promised myself I would experience in the places ahead of us.

One of my homes was a haunted wooden 3 story house with a Cherry Tree and a porch swing in Portland, Oregon. My Dad was a Federal Agent who travelled a lot, so it was just my Mom and my sister and I and our Giant Schnauzer Jeeves. We were able to dress up in 90’s velvet and go see The Nutcracker every Christmas. We had block parties every 4th of July. My sister and I played cops and robbers with the neighborhood kids, sticky with the juice of red and blue popsicles that looked like rockets. Sometimes we would go to other Federal Agent’s houses and let off the illegal fireworks they had confiscated. Mom would always celebrate even though she was the only English person on the block, sometimes proudly flying the Union Jack on the outside porch.

My sister and I would spend our summers ingrained in the entrepreneurial pursuits of a 5 and 7 year old. We set up lemonade stands and sang obscure Beatles songs from The White Album to our neighbours for 50 cents a pop. We threw crab apples from our tree at neighborhood kids, starting a war that lasted until we were ushered in for dinner, sweaty and happy and full of victory.

Our home was very different when my Dad was there. We had to be careful not to color in too loudly or that we hadn’t left our shoes facing the wrong direction. Sometimes he would laugh and play with us with genuine joy in his heart, and sometimes the exact same thing would set off his unreasonable rage. Mom tried to protect us as much as she could, but sometimes it just made things worse. It was a delicate balance. We eventually left to live in Buckinghamshire when I was 9 years old. I remember the night my Mom said we were leaving. Lizzie snuck into my room and we crouched together on the floor to listen through the Victorian air conditioning grate we had come to use as our earpiece to the goings on of Grownup Land downstairs. Dad

was crying. We had never seen him cry in our entire lives. I stroked Lizzie’s hair like my mom used to do.
I keep certain photos from my life, peeling them from different walls and fridges and sticking them on to new ones. There are a few from when my Mom and Dad first met, we are all in our first home in Berkeley, California. There’s a photo I love of him, he is smiling into the camera, Bruce Lee long black hair, arms wrapped around 9 month old me like he’s won a giant teddy bear from the fair. We are all so new and hopeful. As an adult I understand it wasn’t about us, he was just a man in pain, a product of his life as a Cop and a Federal Agent. It makes me sad when I recognise the battle he must have faced between the person he so often was and the person he wanted to be.

Sometimes I dream I’m inside the living room of that Portland house, looking out at the street outside. Everyone is on the porch, Mom is doing up my sister Lizzie’s jacket, my Dad has his car keys in one hand. There are a few other people there too who I don’t recognise. I run for the door with legs like lead, they’ve forgotten me. The door is locked. I yell and bang my hands on the window, but they are all already walking away.

Our next adventure is Swanbourne, Buckinghamshire, just the Kim women. We play in fields and I practice violin in an old shed. We live opposite my Mom’s Dad who we call Papa David. He makes us duck eggs and burnt tea cakes after school. After a couple of years we are lured back to Virginia by our convincingly remorseful Dad. Our sister Bella is born and we are a family again amongst the blooming dogwood, deadly mosquitos and lush greenery that surrounded our house on Woodburn Rd. Our first Christmas, Dad taunts our Mom with an inflatable Santa you can see from the road, and it feels like home.

Jeeves is still with us in Virginia, he feels like home, the horsey smell of his dander and the warmth of his breath. The year before we move to Michigan, he goes outside in the cold and doesn’t come back for hours. I see my Dad come out of the snowy yard holding him in his arms, all 110lbs of him. His death ends a chapter of many faces and places, schools and government removal vans. I dream of this house too. Bella’s nursery is bright with yellow light and filled with flowers. The other rooms are dark, I cannot find the rest of the family. I open the garage and everyone is there packing the car. They all turn to face me and to my horror their faces are melted like wax, unrecognisable, their animated limbs still stuffing boxes into the trunk.

When I was 16, my mom left for England again, this time just with our littlest sister Bella, our Dad had already moved away. I felt so old then but I was just a confident teenager who had already been through the wars, still a scared child in so many ways.
I remember that drive from Michigan to California, nothing for miles but rocks and sand. My heart was breaking in a thousand ways, my pain the perfect backdrop to the Taking Back Sunday album I was blasting through the blown out speakers of my ford focus. One thing I do know, it gets much harder to leave places the older you get, the more time that has passed, the deeper the connections forged. The promise of new rooms and things to put in them starts to mean less than the people you’ve made your homes in. As I drove away from everything that felt good, I gripped the steering wheel only to be transported back to a memory. I am 5 again, my head is on my mom’s lap on a stripey green cotton sofa, Oregon sun pouring through the blinds. Our Iguana Gabe has escaped the tank again and Jeeves looks at him with calculated interest, Gabe lifts his tail and poops a little lizard pellet onto the armchair.

When I got to California I felt like I was home again, the comfort of your birth place, the reconnection of your soul part to the mushed up human being that has come to meet it.
A year in, I was in a diner on De Anza Boulevard eating waffles covered in strawberries and whipped cream. An old newspaper has been left on the booth beside me. The first 2 pages are stuck together with maple syrup. I skip past the Wildfires and the Shootings and thumb through the Horoscopes to find my star sign. All the other signs are long intricate paragraphs while mine simply reads:
“Stop finding your home in everybody else” ​I rip out the page and run off without paying.

I believe you find homes in people and places and things until you know how to find it in yourself. Native American Shamans believe that you leave parts of your soul in places of trauma, extreme happiness or sadness. They believe it’s possible to reconnect all your soul parts, gathering pieces of yourself that you have lost. My mom and sisters are now all together in this beautiful town of Hastings, to some extent our broken parts are fused together with the bond we share. We all still laugh and cry and bare witness to the many lives we have already led, the bits of us that are still scattered across the world. When you’re a person who has suffered any kind of trauma, you get very good at finding a home in your own thoughts, at being self-sufficient in your own happiness and safety. You create a home in the small and beautiful details of the things that happen around you.

I was home laying in bed next to my best friend Emily, legs tangled together after sneaking back in from a night full of fence hopping, laughing and cheap warm beer. I remember rolling over and smiling at the back of her blond curls, happy in her warm room, listening to the sounds of crickets and her breathing fill the early morning.

One day we cut school and drove to Santa Cruz, sun on our arms and Bay Area Slap on the radio. We drive down Highway 17 into a backdrop of rocks and pines trees, a perfect scene in our teenage indie film. We park up, drink a bottle of raspberry vodka and find a man selling snails with painted shells on the beach. There are 10 of them in a plastic tray, their glued on diamante painted backs glimmering in the heat of the afternoon. They walk around blindly, but it doesn’t matter, their homes are on their backs. We buy one each for $2 and let them loose onto the white sand. Emily’s walks under a nearby boat and mind goes it’s separate way into a sleeping man’s baseball cap.

I’m at home hearing my mom’s voice soft and familiar, reading Beatrix Potter from a tape player, something to listen to keep me from getting homesick as I spent my summers in Korea. I was home in Seoul, 5 years old running around the grounds of my Grandparent’s school, dragging my grandma’s Yorkshire terrier behind me with a child's roughness. I was home playing hide n seek in her closet smelling mothballs and cashmere. I’ve left a part of my soul in that house in Korea, laying on the heated floor smelling Kimchi and Wonderbread.

I’m also home in England, running through bracken, smelling bluebells for the first time, feeling the ancient magic of an English woodland. There is a part of my soul laying on a mattress in a large house in the country, fleas dancing from the sleeping dogs to the backs of our knees.

There is a part of me that is still 7 with my little sister Lizzie, putting ants on our tongue, feeling their lacy legs sprinkle down our throats. Running around laughing and choking on the ridiculousness of childhood.

I’m home laying in the New Forest in a tent of leaves and branches, listening to the creatures of the wood saying goodnight. I am in their home but feel like I’m in my own.

I’m at home sleeping on the floor of Luton Airport, the terminal has caught on fire and we are stuck for 12 hours. I have water and a book and your lap to lay on. I am home.

I’m home dancing in your living room to a record you’ve put on just for me. Your sparkly dress and red wine smile is home.

I’m home sitting at your mom’s kitchen table looking at your baby pictures drinking strong tea. Your face is peaceful and your heart is happy, you look over at us with those bright blue eyes and you’re a boy again, that look is my home.

Home is the way the sea crashes and thunders under you as you catch a wave. The complete loss of control and surrender to the rumbling irrepressible force underneath.

Broken homes, perfect homes, chosen homes, perhaps it doesn’t really matter if your home really is where your own heart is. So here’s to the time travellers, the re-invented, to those of us that feel like ghosts groping through chapters of novels we were never written into. I feel I will always be a snail in a painted shell, moving around with my home on my back and the sands of memory under my feet.