In his A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers writes about issues of identity and belonging, about what home is. I’m all about the trite cliches that comfort me on my Hallmark kinds of days: home is where the heart is; home is just an imaginary place that a group of people misses; home to me is reality. Of course the list goes on, but my favourite image of home comes from Eggers, when he writes of his home as a latticework, the kind of intricately woven strings that form snowshoes. And that latticework in those snowshoes holds him above the snow, keeps him from sinking in to his thighs.
My latticework is all over, and I must have snowshoes that could stomp out the length of the Mississippi River. My support comes from all over, and goes all over. I have my home in GP, the people who first began weaving together my latticework. Here, I know I have many places I can lay my head to sleep, and even more places I can lay my head to cry. My Albion community adds to this initial latticework, and I am sustained by the friends I have made in my most recent years. I know I could fall back and have an entire wall of people ready to push me back up and encourage me to keep going. My New Orleans community gives me purpose, a place to strive toward, a chance for me to hold others up.
But even though I have this latticework and can make my way across the snow, I have been feeling rather discontented as of late. No place feels like home, and I hate to sound like a whiny shouldn’t-be-so-introverted bitch, but I need my people. I know that relationships require some give and some take, and lately I’ve had trouble achieving either. I feel like I have shut myself off from the people I need the most, and refused to acknowledge that I need them.
I need you. I feel myself sinking into the stubbornly melting spring snow, and I’m willing to let myself fade. These last weeks of the semester feel like an eternity is upon me, and not the kind of revelatory eternity promised in the Gospels. It feels more like the kind of mythological eternity of pushing an ever-growing snow-boulder up a steep incline, to no avail.
Save the self-indulgent, oh-so-pitiful musings, I was lucky enough to stumble upon Amos Lee’s “Austin City Limits” late last night on PBS. I’m sure that I’ve heard him before, but had never invested in his music. I just downloaded a bunch of his stuff and am finding myself very happily in love with his music. Sidenote: he’s pretty cute, too. Much of his music tastes like the south: sensual R&B style infused with licks of bluesy guitar, and held up by the kind of nuggets-of-truth lyrics that sustain me.
“Because every moral has a story. Every hand needs a glove. Sometimes it’s for glory, oh but mostly it’s for the love. It’s the love that pulls me through, so when they tell me to keep on dreaming, that’s just what I’m gonna do.”
