For me, right now, home is a four hundred mile stretch of farms and fields. St. Paul, to Madison, to Chicago. Three cities, three bright lights. They buckle tightly across the heartland like Orion's Belt. I am lost somewhere along them, a ghost on 94 south bound with my heart all torn up in where I was and where I am going to be. There is the cold hard wood of my parents house. It smells like home. In Madison Wisconsin I walk through a surreal half-life where I know every face. In Chicago I hold my oldest friends in my arms and I don't want to flee my irresponsible and fast paced days in the city.
The St. Paul brickyard
s are just across the river from downtown. They are old, abandoned. Little children hike there trying to find fossils; the whole riverbed used to be submerged. There are little shelters, old buildings, from when they made bricks there and the train tracks still run alongside the river. The buildings have all broken down, leaving skeletal remains, chimneys leading to nowhere. I come back there every season, with my friends I build a fire and sit, in the snow or the leaves. I look across the river at the city I grew up in. The first bank building still flashing 1 in red neon. It's a comforting thing. When we're all back in the city it's like a little lie we all believe in. We walk in single file and laugh our hardest. It's as if we'll never leave our roots again, and when we do, our nonchalance portends the fleeting nature of our reunions. We trust that we'll convene again.Lila ash, tells me that home is a place that only exists in her dreams for now, because she has not found it in reality. She sent me these two images to my Madison address. On March 26th, when we were both in this city for the same minute, we walked around a block in downtown Madison twice, looking for access to this house, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright:
I don't know what Lila dreams about, when she dreams about home.
I dream about a house like this,
the river and the lakes,
and the people I walked with.
