brain transplant

My room is bedless, and my floor is littered with boxes filled with my mom's things. I've been sleeping on an air mattress (the same one I slept on for about two months last summer), next to a pile of too much bedding.

I feel very transplanted on this trip home.

My mom is in an apartment not far from here (even more in the middle of nowhere, somehow), and this house feels huge with just my Dad and me. With my stuff all gone or moved or overtaken by my parents, I can see how my parents are living without me. And with me, it's not much different.

I think I upset my mom. I've been very irritable lately, and she's been sensitive to it. "I just wish you were happier to be home," she said. But, though I love my parents (however little I understand them), it doesn't feel like home.

I've written about it but haven't really been able to convey how being home in Hastings makes me feel versus being home in Chicago. There is something so... so insidiously small about this small town.

I tend to be very sensitive to my environment. When I was in Germany, the language barrier left me feeling terribly lonely. When I was in Boulder, with the flatirons and cyclists all around, I felt reinvigorated. Even when I went to the Schaumburg IKEA, outside of Chicago, all the sprawling, flat chain stores on the way left me feeling slightly dead inside.

The feeling this place gives me, however, is unique; I lived here for 18 years, after all. What I notice, what makes me feel a deep kind of despair, is just how static this town is. The same people will be eating at the same restaurant; the same man will be walking the same dog around the same block; the same cashier checks me out at the same store. Maybe it all sounds comforting--the constance, the reliability--and I guess it all was up until the age of 12. But in truth, once I began to stretch beyond just wanting annual rituals, it started to starkly show how stifled and meaningless things are here. I'm so powerfully influenced by it that I start going into old habits; watching TV, getting too lazy to clean anything up.

I've grown accustomed to my life in Chicago. The people I hear walking and laughing below my apartment window at 1AM. Our neighbors' parties, which, due to our face-to-face living room windows, we can not only hear but watch, if we want. Foreign food (not to mention vegetarian food), foreign people, foreign language--all not far from our front door. Environmental awareness. Public transportation. Sirens. Bookstores everywhere; students reading Marx and Durkheim in coffee shops. That's comfort. I love the dynamics and busy feel of the city; I was meant to live there.

In Chicago, I feel like I can write substantial things, like I can make my way to other countries somehow, like life-changing things and people are within my reach. Here, I feel cut off from everything and even start wanting to question my capabilities. Here, I wonder how a person who leaves this town can decide to come back to it. I feel like I would do anything, anything, not to live here again.

I have a terrible headache and long for tea, but at this point it's too far away...