The Way Home Is Not The Way Home Anymore.
“The way home is not the way back home anymore,” he thought as he boarded the train, still thinking about the dead bird on top of the garbage can on the platform behind him. The entire walk to the train station seemed symbolic, with a hint of sweat. He thought it was the smell coming from his crotch or his pits that was rank with death, but instead, it was the angelic corpse of a little yellow bird.
It wasn’t a cold goodbye, but no one was crying either. John couldn’t stop repeating what his uncle said before they hugged awkwardly and said their adieus, “I’m sad to see you go,” not “I’m happy for you, kid.” He knew it was foolish to think he’d finally hear some affirmation from the man who raised him since he was a teen, but like everyone else in his family, it was the same old guilt trip in the face of his progress.
John understood well that he would never be seen as an adult even though he was the one who did all the growing up. He was always defined by his mistakes, not theirs, doomed to be a dinner-time replay of past missteps no matter how hard he worked to be the man he is proud to be today. “How can you let your prior life go when they make you relive the past?” he said as he turned onto Second Street, trying to create as much distance between him and his uncle’s apartment as possible.
The sky was full of cumulus clouds painted pink and blue like carnival cotton candy, adding meaning to a meaningless moment, between wondering at the biblical sunset above him and wrestling with his t-shirt that kept riding up his sticky back because of a heavy bookbag, John nearly missed seeing the first rabbit in the square outside the courthouse. It was a tiny bunny, and he almost didn’t believe it was wild for a moment. John stood there as silently as he could, hoping the rabbit would come hopping over his way so that he could pet it, but the creature had no interest in him and disappeared underneath some shrubs by the brick wall and out of sight.
“So when are you leaving?” his sister asked. “April 22nd,” replied John. “That’s the day our mom died,” she said in her usual judgy way. “I know; it’s not like I chose that date on purpose; look at it as a symbolic killing of the self then,” John said, trying to hold back his temper. He could never escape any chance they had to pour some salt on the wound, and getting worked up and firing back only made him feel worse and gave them more ammo. He just took a sip of water, looked away from Carrie’s annoying face, and hoped someone else at the dinner table would change the subject.
John hadn’t lived back home for fifteen years and was one of the only family members who had moved away from Brockville who ever came back to visit, though, at this moment, he was questioning why he bothered to put himself through this torment. It was like he was the only dependable person around, but everyone treated him like a fuck up while they relied on him to fix their problems. Stuck at the batting end of the baseball diamond while his uncle, his sister, and her daughter riffed knuckle balls at each other, expecting him to make a home run out of the pitching mess.
“Are you actually happy to be moving to the States?” his niece asked. “Huh?” John had zoned out for a while now from all the bickering that was going on between everyone. “Are you happy to be moving to the States?” Emily asked him again. “Of course I am; what kind of question is that?” John snapped back as his brain rebooted from being put on sleep mode for a while. “Fucking case and point right here,” he thought as Emily shrunk in her chair, clearly understanding she had pissed him off. He was married to an American, and they were moving to the States to start a new life together; John was happier than ever, and they still had the gall to ask him if he was happy about moving. “Happy to be moving away from you guys!” is what he wanted to say, but he let the tense silence of the moment subside while waiting for the next stupid question to arise from the round table.
John was so lost in the emotional snuff film playing in his head that the second rabbit only registered once he passed a poster on the garage door of a rabbit sitting next to a pile of tires. He stopped, starred at the fluffy white tail of the bunny in the poster and took a few steps back to the driveway leading to the back of the garage where an old tool shed stood basking in the peachy light of the setting sun and there in the blueish shadows sat the second rabbit. Stoic and far enough away not to care about his presence, the rabbit just sat there looking more like a lawn ornament than a real-life critter. “Two rabbits have got to mean something,” John thought but couldn’t be bothered to pull out his phone and Google the mystical meaning behind these chance encounters.
He was headed back to Toronto to finish packing and emptying his apartment before he got on a bus with his wife and crossed the border in a few weeks. He’d only been back home for two weeks but missed Alexandria like it had been two years. She was the only person who could calm him, and with each step towards the train station, John was rushing for no reason other than trying to feel like he was that much closer to hugging her in his arms. Alexandria wanted to come to Brockville, but John didn’t want her around his family. They were always making remarks about America or bringing up how they never thought John would marry and end his bachelor ways or his drug and alcohol addiction. They would even call her Leanne, one of his exes, and he couldn’t put her through that, but being there by himself was testing his strength this time.
During moments like these, John wished he could smite them down. Oh, how wonderful it would be to string together words so virulent that the very air of them would poison his family’s punitive existence. But John knew that even as their skin bubbled and boiled, they would forgive themselves of all he had to say and weep away as the forever victims they claimed to be. “No, not even the Devil could bind them with such torture to make them see the wickedness of their ways; it will always be you, you, who are wrong and without salvation for your sickness,” John said to the empty street in front of him while he waited for the trafficless light to turn green.
John’s uncle lived down the road from the river, and the riverfront trails had long been a place of escape for John from his childhood trauma. This time was no different, and John found himself out walking at least three times a day, sometimes racking in more than twenty kilometres along the way. It was the only way he could keep his head clear, but it was a mental bandaid wrapped in the comfort of familiarity and routine. He’d stop off at the cafe a few streets over, grab an iced coffee and begin one of his three caffeine-fueled daily escape mazes from his family. Even after all this practice, though, the walk to the train station felt humid and heavy, his legs dragging while tripping over his feet. With all his bumbling around, you’d think that the third rabbit would have been long gone before he came upon it, but as John rounded the corner to the train station parking lot, there it was.
The third rabbit wasn’t a rabbit but a hare. A scrappy fellow with patches of fur missing on one side of its body. “Things always happen in threes around me,” said John. A brief attempt at coercing the animal failed, and the hare vanished. John continued the couple hundred feet across the parking lot and found himself standing on the platform, staring down the tracks looking east and west into the velvet blue dusk that had settled upon him. This was the last time he would board a train from Brockville to Toronto. John was headed back home, but nothing about Toronto ever felt like home to him, no more than his hometown felt like a damp abandoned pit where people come to die. That was the whole point of the big move he was about to undertake; to find a place to finally call home.
As the train rumbled through the countryside, John looked out the window into the darkness reflecting the car’s interior back to him. No music was angry enough tonight, and he knew that once he got off that train in Toronto, he would be bombarded with a wall of noise from the urban jungle waiting to replace the family misery concert. “It’s not about burning bridges, but removing links,” John repeated to himself in sync with the train passing over the tracks. “The way home is not the way home anymore which should be good enough for now,” he thought as the lights of the Toronto skyline came into view. “They say blood is thicker than water, but the earth’s waters flow through me. My communion is with nature, not family. The stars that reflect in the pool of life drain into the earth’s veins, and that is where my family lies, and I will find a home upon these fertile soils if I can’t save myself from being too poetic.”
John versed to himself while waiting in the slow-moving line of people debarking the train, trying to avoid having an anxiety attack two mins into being back in Toronto….. ”I’m going to walk out that door and disappear, oh how I want to disappear. To be invisible, to be inhuman. Never thirst or hunger again, crave affection and attention, never know loss and love, never feel pain and trauma, never be betrayed and left behind. To find the strength to not go gently into that good night, to live a life,” said John to the urban sprawl before him. It’s a short subway ride back to his apartment, where Alex awaits him across the street. Her smile says it all, “she is my home,” John says to himself before crossing the street and holding her in his arms, the stars in the pool draining into this moment overflowing his cup. “Only seventeen more days,” says Alex, and John smiles at her while looking into her eyes for what he hopes will be the next seventy years.
