Missing a Place Like Home
Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,
my home a near four by six inches.
I always loved neatness. Now I hold
the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.
This is home. And this is the closest
I’ll ever be to home. When I return,
the colors won’t be so brilliant.
The Jhelum’s waters so clean,
so ultramarine. My love
so overexposed.
And my memory will be a little
out of focus, in it
a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped.
Agha Shahid Ali
Like a postcard, home always looks a little brighter when you’re missing it. Vista’s are remembered a little more sublime, personalities feel a little more caricatured, emotions become more sentimental. You don’t remember home just for the experiences you had there, you remember it for everyone else’s;
you remember the collective experience. Memories of a late evening drive melt into the archetypal twilight cruise. You’ve been there, turning to the west to see last light of the sun refuse to give up its keep of the day, then, turning to the east, you see blacks and blues and stars anxious to have the spotlight. You know the radio is playing some hopeful and familiar song, the lyrics of which you hardly know but the tone of which couldn’t better narrate the tension of the sunset. Another collective memory you recall is being at your favorite restaurant with friends and family. It’s busy, but that doesn’t hinder your conversation. Someone tells a joke or reminds you of a memory and soon the whole table is rolling. The food takes too long to arrive, though time only adds to the flavor. Not all the recollections are enjoyable. You’re at the funeral of a loved one. Rain falls softly. Even if it didn’t rain when you attended, you’ll remember rain, because there is always rain. This is the collective. This is the postcard.
You miss it. And when you return it’s not the same.
So why go back? Why not live in the ideal, where colors, smells, and feelings are all heightened and distorted in the most beautiful way? It’s because of the hope that it may be all that and more when you do return. For the hope that the next time you think of home after that visit, the colors and the smells and the feelings will be a little more poignant. The new set of memories might just exceed the beauty of that postcard you’re already holding on to. Those memories will become part of the greater memory, a shared one with those who think of home the way that you do.
President’s Day weekend presented an opportunity to go back to Zion and Bryce National Parks, a home away from home where I’ve hiked and camped since my childhood. When driving into Zion’s, I felt the same way Jay Gatsby felt about Daisy after being in her company again.
“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.”
The colors were not as stunning as I had remembered, the heights not as grand, and the sun not as bright. There were moments during the trip when the two parks fell short of my dreams, not because of their flaws, but because of the sheer intensity of my own memories.
The time came to leave, and driving back out of the canyon, what I had felt in those three days couldn’t be captured in a photograph or a postcard. I knew a picture wouldn’t be able to compare to hiking Angels Landing in the rain, clinging onto the chains to combat the nausea, my shoes slipping on the wet red rock. Nor could it capture the euphoria of snowshoeing and descending below Bryce Point while the fog ascended out of the canyon opening up a paradise of color unavailable from the lookout above.
Maybe one day, home will settle somewhere pleasantly in the middle, but for now, let your memory be “a giant negative, black and white, still undeveloped.”
