No Direction Home

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 brickyards 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.

Getting out of Rockford

Emma Baker was five years older than me. She lived down the street, in a white stucco house owned by her mother. Mrs. Baker worked all the time, but I would see her some Saturday mornings in the front lawn, waiting for her boyfriend smoking a cigarette or reading a magazine. My mother must have felt for Emma because she was prone to bringing her up in a moment of spontaneity. “She’s such a nice girl,” she would mention wistfully. I suppose she’d always wanted a daughter.
It was no surprise then that even after the awkward play dates of our earlier years Emma was ever present in my life. Up until she turned twenty she would be in and out of my house about once a week, a dramatic decline from her daily presence when I was in middle school. Her presence was always simple, bordering on homely. She must have been well read or brainy, because from my understanding she associated little with her peers. After she finished high school, Emma worked at the Burger King. When my friends and I would stop through out on some mischief, she’d wave a small wave at me from the drive through. I didn’t sit with her and play Legos anymore, but some Sundays she would float into the kitchen with an air of purpose and, seeing me there, would stop and smile her wan freckled smile, “Hey Billy-bear.”
The summer after my first year of high school she left Rockford for good. She had finally put together money to start college at Illinois State. The day before she left, Emma told me that I had been like a brother to her, though my fifteen-year-old self felt emotionally unaccomplished. It was a brief farewell, but I remember it clearly, down to the way her straight blond hair hung past her shoulders, making her pretty on our summer lawn. My mother cried those tears of feminine obligation as she hugged Emma, “Be good honey, you’re such a smart girl.”
I only ever saw Emma one time after that, though my mother told me she wrote on and off. It was two days after my thirtieth birthday in a Starbucks on Clark Street (I had moved to Chicago after graduate school). Her familiar smell caught me off guard, and I saw her slip out the door into a grey winter afternoon. As she walked past the window I still saw that warm silence, reassuring like when we watched movies in our pajamas, twenty-five years ago.