Where is Home?

Where is Home?

            Walking into the library today I was met with the vision of droves of dirty, poor, ripped-clothing people piling into a just opened library double-door. I had many mixed emotions that shocked me and stared me straight in the face. Fast back to a time when I sat on my grade-school front lawn being homeless at 25 with remembrances of creamy devil cakes in my lunch box and smiles on the playground at lunch time. At that time most of my belongings were scattered, some in friends’ basements - embarrassingly now somewhat unorganized to the previous detail of a home in a sound mind; I found myself a woman of no profession or skill to support myself. I had no home but was being offered a nestled bed in return for breakfast in the morning by men.  At 25 my dad, where his taxes had no need for me to apply for financial aid now, now offered assistance for college. But where my seven years from exhaustion trying to survive had run me out of any strength I had and sound of mine what he said to me had no meaning to me at all. I couldn’t think straight to make any rational decisions. My mind and body was weary. My last night sleeping in a safe, solid foundation left me on a floor of my ex-boyfriend’s (who threw me out for what expectations he thought we had and what aspirations he felt I should have) wrapped in the drapes he left behind. My head had been banged hard against his SUV (paid in cash) in our last argument.

We played a single game of darts that seemed to be the only thing we had in common. I enjoyed it because I remembered how gracefully my hand would flow growing up when I would throw the dart. It brought back warm feelings of the heated cellar as I would throw the darts to the overly brightened tiles that didn’t hold the end of the point of the dart well because the depth of the dartboard was too thin. I rest assured at those times though because I knew where my next meal was coming from and could smell my mom’s clean, crisp sheets as I rolled in between them on a summer’s night after she took them off the clothes line from hanging them the morning before. The 45’s spinning while my brother and I go-goed on beds and toy boxes using hair brushes and other articles for microphones singing backup as my sister took the lead in our bedroom. I guess the homelessness in my mind was the mixed emotions from my life.

by Lori Jean

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