Where is Home? Redone

Where is Home?

By Lori Finnila

Walking into the library today I was met with the vision of droves of dirty, poor, ripped-clothed people piling into a just opened double library door. I had many mixed emotions shocking me staring me straight in my face. Fast back to a time when I sat on my grade-school front lawn with remembrances of creamy devil cakes in my lunch box and smiles on the playground at lunch time now this being the only place I had for quiet to sit and think. 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.  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 of any sound mind what he said to me had no meaning at all. I couldn’t think straight at that time to make any rational decisions. My mind and body was at its weariest.

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 to be the only thing we had in common that day. I enjoyed it because I remembered how skillfully my hand would throw the dart to the thin board that it barely caught upon. It brought back warm feelings growing up of a heated cellar and 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. My head tightly pressed against the expensive cushions of my father’s speakers, music searing gratefully into me in our living room, I rest assured because I knew where my next meal was coming from. I could still smell my mom’s clean, crisp sheets as I lay in bed with thought, yet bypassing to grab the light, white sheet and lay it upon me 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 combs as microphones singing backup to my sister as she took the lead in our bedroom. I guess the homelessness in my mind was the mixed emotions from what I had missed and feared the most in my life.

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