a dialogue

It’s difficult—to explain the strangeness of moving back home after spending seven years elsewhere,

•

difficult—to reckon with what home means, to not feel any of my historical comfort at being here.

•

To, in this way, feel homeless, untethered.

•

This year has been especially hard for most of us. There has been a certain sense of flux and uncertainty which, for me, was madeworse by the fact that I didn’t have anything lined-up post-master’s, thus jackthrusting me back into the box of my hometown.

•

Being back in Berkeley, California is strange because here is my childhood, laid before me, and yet I no longer am a child.

•

Being back home is strange: back in my childhood bedroom, its pink walls and curtains, the secret messages scrawled on the underside of my bedframe.

•

All my old notebooks tucked into the storage closet.

•

Age seven: I wish there was an upside-down waterfall with a stream in the sky.

•

Age seven: The day is amazed when the night unfolds her cape and fills up with stars.

•

Age seven: I am the San Andreas Fault. I am a big long crack.

•

Back in this house on this faultline, I become it again: a crack, fissuring.

•

I lived in this city for eighteen years, so moving home means being assaulted by memories:

•

smoke-filled summers spent submerged under lakewater;

•

falling from the treehouse, the feel of pine needles beneath my palms;

•

gorging myself on wild blackberries;

•

scampering up onto roofs to see the view of the San Francisco skyline.

•

Age eight: where the ocean hums.

•

The inevitable hollers that followed. You’re trespassing!

•

Back in my boyhood—which was just my girlhood before the awareness of danger—I climbed every tree. I gathered flowers from so many gardens, eager to give bouquets away.

•

Age eight: And the creature went back to catch that fish—the one with a spell—a boy—and when he was found he was turned back—

•

The pool I almost drowned in.

•

Age seven: Duck duckling of the lagoon. why do you swim so calmly? while I’m crying alone.

•

Being back home, every day I drive past the primary school I went to:

•

tie-dyed shirts, half-zip pants, too-big shoes,

•

where I saw a classmate’s bone come clear through her skin,

•

where I hid under the desk after every tremor.

•

Every morning before work, I stand in front of my childhood mirror, the one I looked into the night I spoke on the phone, shaking, said I like like her.

•

Age eight: Love, with the wind that blows so wildly it keeps us safe in night mares.

•

The panic attack I had on the hardwood floor.

•

Age eight: My secret looks like a wave and salt.

•

Age eight: my secrets are lost, my secrets are forgaten.

•

The seashells on the windowsill.

•

My first day back, I saw my high school crush walking down University Avenue as if no time had passed. Hot Emily, I’d always called her—

•

which wasn’t my most feminist choice.

•

Age seven: and the cloak of the hours lies down to dream.

•

My second day back, I went down to Fourth Street, where my friend’s parents had lived back when they were living.

•

Age seven: The vase of the sky suddently broke. all of us cried.

•

I went back to the lake where I’d jumped from the rocks, half-hoping I wouldn’t survive the fall.

•

Age nine: then I am in a room, under water, I can see I can breathe, I open a door.

•

Age nine: I am in a wonderful place, no danger at all.

•

All the alyssum still makes its way into my poems, still sprouts through the sidewalk cracks.

•

Age eight: black earth with wite flowers.

•

My best friend’s childhood home. Tiny imprint of her hand on the sidewalk.

•

I don’t know if home is still the word for where I am.

•

The sunflowers, eucalyptus, lavender.

 •

Age seven: Oh wow! Pretty flowers. I’ll pick a cuple.

•

The fields of clover I lay in,

•

dress clinging to skin in the rain.

•

Age seven: In the cristal of the bubble the big earth reflects.

•

My father’s cactus, the one day a year it blooms.

•

Age seven: The rooster opens his beak and the sun comes out. The sun opens his hand And the day is born.

•

The scissors I used to hack off my hair.

•

Age nine: my eyes shut my heart likes to hide.

•

The sycamores lining Marin Avenue.

•

Age seven: the wind blowing my hair. the cars zooming by on the street.

•

The path down to the creek, predictably overgrown with poison oak.

•

Is home still home when most of the people you love have left it?

•

The scent of sunburnt leaves.

•

The rusted X-Acto knife in my top drawer, still hidden away.

•

Age seven: Pony buddy how far ar you taking me?

•

The rooms I very earnestly tried to die in.

•

Out in the garden, the buzz of bees.

•

Is home still home when I’m nowhere near who I was before?

•

The parks I’d sneak out to after dark: Remillard, Crescent.

•

Age seven: The moon was one big house.

•

The water-warped treehouse is gone now, but there are still the steps nailed into the bark.

•

The bed where I had my first time,

•

bled,

•

cried.

•

Age seven: The light reversed itself and the black got born.

•

The neighbors don’t recognize me now.

•

Age seven: Plop! another planet ends.

•

The weeds I was paid to pull. Two cents each!

•

Age seven: The blue came and painted its time.

•

The same jar in the cabinet—honey to mix into my tea.

•

Is home the place where ghosts linger at every corner?

•

Age seven: Oh! I sure want to go home.

•

Or is home the place that forbids you your forgetting?

•

Still the overgrown graveyard out back, the cats and dog and fish we held funerals for, mostly bones now.

•

Age seven: The waiting continues while the water splashes outside.

•

Years later, my parents still add the same detergent to the wash.

•

The sand-dollars collecting dust on my dresser,

•

the beehive in the neighbor’s garden.

•

I know I call this city home but it reeks of loss.

•

All I knew feels pocked with holes—

•

like a cut of sea coral, a honeycomb.