A little tea, a little chat

This is another thing about whether you can go home. When I was little my father disowned us from both sides of our family. Only very recently, a year or two ago did I start seeing my mother's two sisters. I've been invited to a birthday for one of them this weekend, at which I would see oodles of my mother's side of the family, really all there would be to see. Do I go? Every time I think about it, I can't help saying to myself You Can't Go Home, but maybe you can? Maybe? If you suddenly for the first time, in effect, see all these people you might have spent your life with and didn't, is that like going home? I don't know....Does it work? Or will I just feel like I should have left things just as they were.

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I’ve always known the truth of this, you can’t go home again. Yet, as I’ve spent more time in Adelaide, my home town, over the last few months than I have collectively since I first left in the mid-eighties, I’ve found it even more painful than I expected. For the first time in so many years I’ve started taking buses again and reverting to childhood, sitting at the back, like a young love is going to magically appear next to me and…

I’ve started going to the shopping centre local to my mother again and just stepping into the place makes me want to cry. I don’t want to, please don’t make me go in there, I keep saying to my mother, it’s too big, I get lost, since I can’t tell her why. It, like the buses, is a time machine that takes me right back to my teens, right back to that heady time when everybody in the world loved you and you didn’t even notice, right back to a time where, in the tree of analysis, you took a move that determined your life from that point, but you are back there again, and this time, maybe, you could take that other move and maybe…

If you want to be in the place, the very place you are right now, if that is where you want to be, then everything that came before it, even the miserable, even the fucked-up-what-on-earth-were-you-thinking-about, every bit of it has brought you here.

So, I’m thinking I should spend some months with my mother, just move back to Adelaide for some months, why not, I’m living out of a suitcase anyway and she’d have a nice time and there really isn’t a reason it should hurt me, I love going for visits, it’s just a long visit, but. Usually I don’t go on a bus there. I never step foot in the shopping centre. You can’t go home, this won’t be going home because it can’t be. I shouldn’t be scared of this, should I.