I miss it all like a thousand fucking firecrackers. I miss it like a wound misses a knife and I miss it like a baby turtle misses the mother that they'll never see again, yet without her they would be nothing at all. I miss the small room I lived in piled with dirty clothes and sprinkled with trash and the dirt in my carpet from four years of the kindest people I have ever met. I miss knowing things and not showing up in person, but still managing to weasel my way into success. I miss my home, and I know my mom still flinches a millimeter when I say I miss home and I don't mean the place I grew up, but the place I went to school but that's the thing. We grow up our whole lives, not just from 0-18, and good god we must find home where we can, and sometimes home comes from choices made about who you are and where you belong, not where your parents found was the best place to raise you. So of course, I know where I grew up impacted me, finding part of what would be my very Queer self in a WASP-y community where many parents pretended to be slightly less conservative than they were and much of the youth pretended to be slightly more liberal than they were, which may sound like the same thing, but I swear to you it's not. I know the few people I truly deeply connected with from there will never fully leave me, but recalling that as home would be like recalling the air I gasped for while drowning as comfort, not the dry land where I could finally stop fearing a metaphorical death. So I miss college and I miss my dry land, and I am not gasping for air here either, but I sure as hell don't feel known or comfortable. However, that is the way of the fish, or some of them rather: to eventually walk on land as a means of evolution. So no, I still literally can't walk because I'm disabled, and I make crazy metaphors that don't quite make sense and make me sound crazier than I am (or perhaps just as crazy as I am). However, that's the thing about homes; they make you crazy because for so long, they were something mythical, always out of you grasp, too perfect. But then suddenly, there you are, and your wildest dreams are right in front of you, and you hurt; it all hurts, and everything is messier than you ever thought it could be, but then it solidifies and all of a sudden, you're not dreaming and you are as real as ever. Because. You do deserve good things.
So here I am, missing the comfort and love I worked my ass off to find, but knowing that one thing is real that I once thought mythical, and perchance many other things I perceive as mythical are simply waiting to be found.
