ON STAYING HOME

It’s an old revelation for a new year. The precursor is that I cried in the days leading up to my flight home because I wasn’t sure what to expect when I got back. I had spent a long time thinking about my consumerist habits, my dreams, and the way my insatiability followed me everywhere, like it does us all. A few classic examples:

At home, wanting to be anywhere else

Anywhere else, missing the comforts of home

Having bought the “last coat I would ever need,” finding another one

I arrived home feeling a lot of guilt and trepidation. My mother was angry with me, she thought I hadn’t been treating her well, I thought I was doing my best. I had tacked Applied Math, that last minute decision, onto my Literary Arts concentration, and I was ready to cut through my insufferably humanistic education with concerns revolving around numbers, things I didn’t really believe in, to turn my mother’s tireless efforts, her youth, and her emotional upheaval into things well spent. I knew she was unhappy with me, and I wasn’t ready to seek forgiveness without action.

Strangely, unexpectedly, on one of our routine morning runs, with the triangular formation of my mother at the head and my sister and I tailing, each footfall drummed into me the feeling that this little world containing my family had healed while I was gone. It was raining, and we stopped periodically on the way back to our house because the dandelions on the side of the road were in violent bloom, and my mother said that our pet rabbit enjoyed eating them, roots especially. This from the same mother who, in the months before I left, had developed a kind of jealousy complex regarding the rabbit, to whom she felt my sister and I offered more affection than we did her. We ordered Japanese for dinner, and my sister mentioned how they hadn’t eaten out since I went to school. “We should go to the mall before you leave,” my mother said. Of course they hadn’t been back there in the length of a semester.

I began to imagine myself as a black hole. Craving restaurant food, clothing, understanding, closure, and always to leave, everything slipping down the gullet. The suitcase I packed for wintering the break was certainly enough for four weeks away from my new “school home,” but I was surprised, met with an entire forgotten wardrobe when I got back. Barely space in the closet for that coat and then the other. How had I accumulated so much, and how had it slid past me, and why, in my absence, had that accumulation slowed to a trickle, how had my mother and sister learned to love each other and the rabbit at the same time, and how had the morning runs stopped being something my sister and I faked sickness to get out of and turned into a treasured little meditation, from where did this harmony descend, or resume?

“I’m trying,” I told my mother.

“It’s not about that,” she said. “What you owe me is love.”

That month was the most peaceful I had ever felt at home. After the breakdown on the first night, there were no more fights, only soft requests—come to the grocery store with me? shall we take a walk together?—and soft acquiescence. I thought about what made this kind of assent so difficult before, why the pressure of a schedule upended by a grocery outing had made me so angry and resistant, why I couldn’t find it in myself to call my mother during the months I was away unless impatiently prompted. I was too busy cooking with friends, making schemes, planning out my grandiose future where I would rise above into the annals of constellations.

Each mistake was related. I wanted more, thought I deserved more. Who was it that tricked me into believing there was more than my mother, my sister, the home she cultivated for us, the dailiness, what we owed to each other? In truth, the grandest thing I can give to anyone is my love. I owe her everything.

I ran in circles around myself. This home and then the “other.” In mornings, I woke up in my old bed, a hallway away from the people who love me even more than I love myself, who are thinking of me always. I used to think that was a burden, to be thought of. When I first left, it put me into a sour mood to be reminded that my sister wanted me to text her, that these relationships were to be maintained, “I have a problem with object permanence,” I said. How callous of me.

Now I am back at school. In the wee hours on my first night back, I cried again. I unpacked and shifted my things from drawer to drawer, searching for the best way to position them, I wanted to approximate the love I felt when I first unwrapped the box and cut off the tags. Or the love from down that hall. I couldn’t sleep, so I turned the lights back on. My room in the apartment, its robin’s-egg walls that hold so little. I am mourning this distance from home, which is unlivable.

JANE WANG B’24 lives for love.