I have a coat, greenish denim with huge furry cuffs that swallow my wrists. The acrylic, black-white fur travels around my neck, down the front, around the back, leaving me behind a periwinkle liner. Sometimes I think that the coat is me, that if I were a coat I would look like denim and faux fur. It hides me from cold and snow, it swallows the crystalline flakes in its pores… its warmth reminds me of what home should be. But no matter how much I search, I can’t find my heart in that coat.
I went to a bookstore, and I found belonging there in its fictional warmth. It rained outside, a cold, biting rain, all drizzle and frost that burnt the eyes, but I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t hear anything. It felt surreal in that place, and I felt that I could relate to even the middle-aged man snoring on the decade old couch in the poetry section. I had two books in hand, one about people living in cigarette boxes, another about worlds past our own. The bill came to $26.69, and I felt my mother’s hand on my shoulder, asking me, reproachfully, “You spent nearly $30 on two books? Are you insane?” “I’d rather have the books than a coat,” I replied, thanking the cashier whose automaton voice wished me a good day.
And now I wonder, thinking of those books with their strange themes, their imaginative playgrounds, if I belonged in their pages. The settings were places I knew well, settings normal people wouldn’t understand, settings that would give them another reason to raise their eyebrows at me. I wonder if I could find my heart smashed between its pages, traces of crimson across the words, or pressed paper thin, dried tissue, across the middle. Maybe my arteries were the seams.
So many have come to accept the belief that that old saying meant that acceptance could be found in one’s own heart, that the home wasn’t a place to love, but a state of being. But what if there is no acceptance, no solace in simply being? And how many people have really taken time to test the meaning and see if they could find comfort in themselves? Few, I suppose.
….but I know where my heart is.
And maybe, in the end, it’s those that don’t know where their hearts lie that are truly homeless.