thoughts on returning

my backyard sounds like high school. the crickets singing memories of texting a boy until 1 am and still walking shyly past each other in the hallway. the neighbors are loud, like always. their screams echoing from their backyard, the one I watched them grow up in, the one I grew up in before their time. it looked different then. a circular porch around one big tree in the middle of the yard that became our Pride Rock, we two little lions surveying the land. no brothers allowed.

a colleague says she likes looking at my backyard during meetings. that it looks like the everglades. I wonder if she can see the silhouettes of pool parties past. the sounds of sailor moon games straining against my mute button.

a few guaranteed things about coming home: there will be salmon. my mother will ask, “when was the last time you got new sneakers?” I will get caught in the doorway, watching the middle of a movie I said I wasn’t interested in. “sneakers are the one thing you really should splurge for.” someone will overcook the corn, and I will use too many coffee beans. “sneakers and tires.” we will decide to become a games family, only to realize bananagrams is the only game that really works for us. “and pasture raised eggs.”

I was ok in math class. but I did not understand the term exponential growth until now.

I have walked the same loop through this neighborhood so many times I can tell the bends in the road by how many leaves crunch under my toes, how many dips in the gravel I catch with the tip of my new sneakers. we don’t cut through the field anymore. this path is so well worn by my feet, by my mothers. I didn’t count on going out one tuesday afternoon and finding family history around the first turn up via continental, tripping over stories I did not know and was not expecting.

my nighttime routine is the closest thing I have to religion. every night I baptize myself in the bathroom sink, a regular anointing with one of the glass bottles of cloudy liquid I have been told will cleanse me of my sins. my eucharist a little melatonin tablet. my eyes heavy with the blessings of sleep.