What is this view?  Surely I’ve seen it before.  I’ve stood in this spot a hundred times before, so I must know this.  Deep in the squishy curves of my brain, there must be some recognition.  But there isn’t.  These crisp, green maple trees are foreign.  The red and white flowers in the cemetery are alien.  The cemetery itself is out of place, now that I think of it.  This place I’ve grew up in is somewhere else entirely.

Or, maybe I’m just going crazy.  Going?  Maybe I’ve just went.  Maybe I never got out of that hospital.  Maybe I’m in some intensive care ward for catatonics, and I’m on a happy little mind-trip.  Maybe I got so fed up with no-shoes and questionable meatloaf and perception tests and the no-touch rule that I wigged out and took flight here… except I don’t know where here is.  There’s a cemetery.  That’s all I know.  That’s all I’m sure of, if I’m really sure of anything at all.

God, I know I’ve ate at this restaurant.  It was my favourite place as a kid… I loved the barbecued chicken they had on the buffet, the heaping piles of mashies, the flaky oven-fresh biscuits that I’d always have Mom butter up for me because she did it just right.  I’ve been here hundreds of times, so I should know that cemetery and those maples and those flowers so well.

I think I should be somewhere else.  I can see in my mind, a place… a dark place, a club, with pulsing bass and flashing lights, and dancing.  People dancing, and I’m dancing, floating, with arms held over my dreadlocked hair.  Everything is so right there, so full of energy and joy.  I feel it… and though I’ve never been there, it feels so familiar.  I’ve never been there but it feels like home.

I wonder… why should a place I’ve never been feel like home, yet the place I’ve always been feel so distant and strange?

Maybe this is growing up – seeing the world with new, adult eyes.  I’m not a kid anymore, and I haven’t been for some time.  Mom hasn’t buttered my biscuits for me in years.  I haven’t chased tadpoles in the creek by my house for quite some time.  I’m embarrassed by the fact that I still like Disney movies, and hope to God no one ever notices that fact.  But why should biscuits and tadpoles and talking hyenas define where I am?

They shouldn’t.  They didn’t.  But these things that were related to my childhood, things that I have rejected in a blaze of teenage glory, were part of this place – this place I’ve called home, this place I grew up.  Maybe I’m not entirely crazy, but just that in the midst of shedding my old, childish skin, I shed the ties to what was once called home.  I never expected nor even heard of that happening to anyone else, but I am always doing everything the hard way, biting thumbs at convention.

And I wonder, now that I’m all grown up, where do I go from here?  Should I fall in love with these trees and flowers and barbecue chicken again, or do I seek the pulsing bass and flashing lights?

For now, perhaps, I’ll learn not to rely on a location to be ‘home’, but find home within myself.