Homesick

I have heard a constant inner complaint for years - a half forgotten recurring dream.

As I'm walking to the bathroom at the office, I'll hear the sigh "I need to get out of here; I want to go home." "But," I tell it, "We like this new job. We really just need to finish the note. We'll go home when it's time. Concentrate."

Running up the stairs to the kids' bedroom, I hear "I wanna go home." "umm," I point out, "we are?"

It's an index card that pops up during times of mental inactivity. We are home, I tell it. We live here. I don't understand.

Janey wrote a love note to her quasi-hometown a while ago. While trying to think of what I would say of the place I spent part of my summer vacation running through, I just felt anger. Sure, we'd been going there since I was young, but it's so buried in resentment now, I have a hard time feeling the joys and freedoms we had as kids - running free for a week with spending money, eating all the egg rolls, ice cream and candy we wanted.

You're too young, they said twenty years ago. When you were a baby, and we went to BigBrother's kindergarten graduation, you cried from the noise. University would overwhelm you. You will come with us, and go to grade 13. In a year, you'll be older, and go to the University we've chosen. They accept grade 13 as University courses.

Fresh from the defeat of running past the cemetery (twice) and up hill both ways for 10 miles, through a community of people who do not recognize me, I hit the wall of why I could not write a love note to this place I have lived, on and off, for 25 years.

It is my prison. My tower. I have struggled for years to get past the feeling of being spirited away to a place not of my choosing (fat lot of good that did - just like Rapunzel, I found my own trouble). I have not.

And I don't think if you asked Rapunzel to write a love note she could either. Even if she loved the witch very much, and was happy with the way things turned out in the end, and used up her vacation time to return with her children every summer so that they could all be together as a family.

"Finally," said the voice, as I stood on the beach in South Haven and looked at the lighthouse, "You wouldn't listen."

"I couldn't," I said, as I drove away.