my mother used to bake her dreams into my dinner to make up for the ones she lost in the delivery room and lately i’ve been crumbling beneath the weight of ways i could become her: who she is, who she was—who she would have been, if only i’d let her. and though she always knew i’d find a new place to be from, it still makes her tear up when i call the city ‘home’. i try not to, really. i come back to this town and this ocean and these mountains and i squeeze into it the way i would my high school prom dress. 

i tell her i missed the curves of the roads. i tell her lies about the strangers i forgot how to know. i tell her, ‘look, it still fits’. i don’t tell her that i leave my window open every night before bed because even though i’m 4,000 miles from the cold, i can’t figure out how to sleep without the fresh air. i don’t tell her that all that’s left there are things i meant to leave. 

since i can remember i’ve been leaving this town in pieces, even when i didn’t know it: a cross country road trip, a college four timezones away, a city i will call home so much even i start to believe it. but ‘home’ will always mean this town, that one particular diner, these cul-de-sacs and their suffocation. ‘home’ like closing time at the dive bar. ‘home’ like gulping down the lingering bitterness at the bottom of the bottle. ‘home’ like clinging to whatever’s left, even if it burns, even if it makes me greedy, even if i should have learned to leave it all behind. ‘home’ like: i’m not sure i know this place well enough to keep calling it that, but maybe it’s better this way.