(no subject)

I keep having sense-hallucinations. Today it was buttermilk pancakes, but only the scent, not the taste or the sight. Of course, because smell is so connected to memory, it triggered a mental snapshot of the kitchen at home. Red handles on the cabinets, minature cacti on the small towel-shelf next to the brass letter-opener, and the cast-iron griddle that's almost too heavy to lift, on the stove. Pastels hanging on the wall beside the fruit bowl and a parallelogram patch of sunlight on the floor.

I miss home something I can't quite define. I miss real food, and silence, and the angle of the ceiling over my bed, and the claw-footed bathtub upstairs. It's not that I want to be there again, but this week has been altogether too easy, and I don't trust peace. Nothing has happened to me, none of the things I dreaded after coming out, and I feel as though I'm going to get hit with extra vitriol for this week without threat.

The hallucination, perhaps, brought home to me something I hadn't quite realized. I am, for all intents and purposes, homeless. Not in the sense that I sleep on the streets, of course, but in the sense that I have no permanent base for myself, somewhere I belong without question, somewhere I go to lick my wounds in safety. The house I grew up in is in a town I hate and have promised myself never to return to permanently; where I lived this summer was temporary; my current residence throws me out on a regular basis; where I will live next year is a dormitory; and after that, I don't know.

There's a girl in the study hall I supervise who looks almost exactly like my sister, and I only realized this today, and now I can't decide if I'm treating her differently from anyone else. And there's one who looks very much as I did at that age (not exactly, thank the gods, because I wouldn't wish my awkward-stage looks on anyone; believe me on this), and now I'm in the grips of a fit of melancholy for my younger self.

Reposted from LJ, 20 March 2009