Brandon Singleton
Published 10/12/2020
I am a homeless man.
Home is the carpet you crawl in once you’ve mastered rolling over. It’s the grass you sleep in as a child. It tickles your neck and cools your bare arms and legs. You gaze at the way-up-there. Clear sky and so many stars you can’t count them, but you try anyways.
Home is Nipper, the cat and Goldie, the horse. It’s sleepovers at grandpa’s house down the hill. He reads you a Sweet Pickles book and recites all the nursery rhymes til you know them by heart. You recite them back until one of you falls asleep. You’re never sure who dozes off first, which means you probably always go first. You get up last, too, greeted with breakfast and grandma's quip that you’re living proof of life after death.
Home is the not the place you live, but the place you return to. It’s where you go to be where you're not. Home is a visit, a short stop on the way to the next somewhere else. You leave home to do everything you have to do. You come home to do everything you want to do.
Eventually, you start taking home with you. It follows you around like your shadow. Home shrinks at first, too, just like your silhouette when the morning turns to noonday. For one fleeting moment, it vanishes. It grows again, though, once the sun crosses the middle of life. Maybe that’s why it's a crisis. It's the moment where home is an invisible shadow hidden perfectly beneath you. There’s no telling when it will peek back out, or in which direction.
Home was outside you, but then it’s inside you. What you say, what you eat, what you do. What you like, what you don’t. Who you like, who you don’t. What you expect of others, and what you expect others to expect of you.
Home is a project. You start to build it, out of wood or brick, out of love or obligation. Home is expensive. It demands everything from you. You don’t always have enough so you cut corners where nobody will notice. You stand back and admire your handiwork.
Some homes make it, and others don’t. Hurricane season hits hard. And the wildfires – it takes one careless match to burn down a hillside. Earthquakes from nowhere shake you. Homes are split in two. Three walls remain standing, but the fourth is just a gaping hole, the insides exposed. You patch it up best you can, make it look like it was part of the initial blueprint. But nobody is fooled.
Home is comfortable, because home is the people who think like you do. Or rather, home is the people who get you to think like they do. They accept you. It’s easy to displace yourself to get a home. It’s hard to raise a home around yourself.
People remind you that home is all. “Home is heaven on earth. Home is where the heart is. There’s no place like home.” They don’t talk about homeless. Homeless is hell on earth. Homeless is where the heart aches. There’s no place like home for me.
I am a homeless man.