More than anything else in the whole wide world, I would love nothing better, could ask for nothing more, than to go home. Home….home is not the sad, brown house I drag my feet to after school. Not that one, the one with chipped paint, where a thousand arguments have emerged and have never truly been dealt with, where I sometimes look in the mirror and feel ugly. Not there, where I lie in bed and stare my glassy stare at the same cracked walls that seem to have ensnared me for the past five years. The house that I once snuck out of, in the dead of night, so I could creep into my mother’s car and cry. Not that one, not that house. Home is a place hidden between the honey sweet words of books. It is somewhere asleep under the brush strokes of paint, in the ink of a good pen. Home is the air I breath when standing in the center of a stage. Someday it will be a place, a real place with a door and windows and everything. But that day is not today, so instead I do the work that must be done to get there and when I have the time, I dream about what that place will be like, how it will look or sound. Sometimes it is painful to live that way, sometimes it is simply painful to live. But such things cannot be helped. I live to find- no to make- a home and that is my story.        

It is 2008. The recession hits and everywhere I look there are for sale sings planted in the lawns of old and new houses alike. One of these for sale signs sits in front of my own home. It sits there mocking me. Two white wooden poles hold it up- white, a symbol of false purity-one sprouting from the ground, the other sticking out the side at the top with the shiney board hanging from it on two short chains. A picture of some smiling woman with neat hair and a fine pressed suit is on this board. I do not know who this woman is but I hate her. I hate her with a passion, for always being there, right outside our house, our home, smiling while the rest of us inside are in a panic still not knowing where we will go. when I come home from school, I have to fight off the intense desire to kick the sign down.  I am in sixth grade, eleven years old, too young to understand vague words like recession and bankruptcy; But, I am not too young to understand that my mother crying is a sign that whatever is happening is serious. I never did kick the sign down, I figured that it would probably be my mother who would have to pick it up and that was a sight I did not think I would be able to handle.       

  A couple months later  we have moved out of our comfortable life in 1900 west avenue and moved into a minute, two bedroom apartment with a second family. Together we form a unit of eight. there is hardly room to breath inside and so I resort to spending all my time wandering about outside. My mother screams at me for walking around like a stray dog; but what is a stray dog? it is a dog without a home and this apartment we are inhabiting is no home of mine. I do not say this, I simply stare blankly at cold, plain walls while my mother’s lecture moves from my wanderings to the way I dress to my weight to my hair to my lack of responsibility and unlady like manner. It was the beginning of my struggle with not only my lack of home but also with all the things that made me just slightly different than everyone else. It was only the beginning of my mother’s vituperative comments, of being called ugly, of being told I was a freak.   

It was also then that I became the subject of ridicule in school. One of the girls in my class had convinced all others that it would be jolly fun to ignore me, except, of course, in the select few moments when she would humiliate me with what she would later argue as “jokes.”  I had no allies, no friends. no one ever tried to comfort nor defend me. In the next year My family would move into and old brown house on the otherside of town. I would go to a middle school of the same school district, with the same classmates. Not that it truly mattered because by then I would be a misanthrope with a complete and utter disbelief towards friendship. Loneliness, I found out, is addictive. Shunned by my classmates and criticized constantly in the very place that was suppose to be, but was not, home. There was no where to go. No one place I belonged. I was not wanted either here nor there and continue not to be now.       But, even so, I never stopped believing that there was somewhere, that there is somewhere. This is what drives me in everything I do, what convinces me to keep breathing, keep living. Even when loneliness bores into me, I truly believe that someday I will…..go home. I never stopped being who I was, I never stopped pursuing the things I loved, doing what I thought was right, that is what lead me through all the terrors of my life  No matter what anyone said to me. I did not need my mother to proclaim me pretty to know that I was. I needed only my own validation to know what I was worth.