Green Jello Hotdish

I’m getting ready to leave now to go to a place I cherish. If you had asked me six months ago, I would have called that place home, but that’s not an accurate description now. If you had asked me a year ago, I would have told you I thought of moving back there, but now even a short weekend visit is too draining and hard.

While I’m there I’ll visit a group of people that are important to me. If you had asked me six months ago, I would have called that group family. Two weeks ago I would call them by name. Last week I called them the family I was born into. Family shouldn’t be this challenging, this defensive.

There is a group of people that means the world to me, a group that defies the name “family,” simply because we are unrelated. This group is challenging in different ways, but never defensive.

Yet in this circumstance, I must act alone. At the end of the day I am alone in this world. I cannot — and maybe should not — have anyone else but myself, have any place but where I presently am. I do not act on behalf of anyone else nor anyplace else. I act on my own, for myself.

They say the most challenging place for acceptance is a young man’s hometown; I’d amend that to also include his birth family.

But what about descriptions? There is no adequate description for what I’m feeling right now. There is no adequate description for where I am right now. There is no adequate description for the most important people in my life right now.

The biggest day of my life before now was the day I left for college, the day I left this nameless place and group. Now that chapter ends, as the reason I left is the same reason I return now. Tomorrow I will try to come up with yet more descriptions for things in my life. I will look through that world with different lenses. The world of my childhood will finally fade into memory. Just like doors closed behind me as I left in 2003, so now are doors closing behind me in 2007.