You and I don’t have a home. We build footsteps as we go along. We fight through sandstorms. We drink red wine and pass out on the porch. We fight in our sleep, in nightmares. We don’t have a home. We build as we go along, in the hopes that one day we may find home.
Mothers taught us to think, to find our way, to get lost in sandstorms and build homes. Fathers taught us to work hard, to keep building dreams. We fought with them. We fought with ourselves. We kept trying, but we never found home.
We are always running, you and I. We run from the cloud of undeniable guilt, we run from absolution. We are afraid of permanence. We like to dress ourselves in silly costumes and never wear the same thing twice.
Do you find home, ever?
I sing. I dance. I write. I fly in my head, sometimes in my dreams, and I never land because landing would mean permanence. I can’t land. I have to fly and I have to keep falling until I find home. Home is everywhere. Home is the little house on Cedar. Home is the brown blocked building Mom and Dad bought years ago and then sold. Home is senora’s casa on calle Hernani and the sunlight melting behind the balcony. Home is the building where the young kids throw parties and get drunk and do wild things.
I won’t search anymore. I am done searching. I will build as I go along. Don’t judge me. Don’t tell me I am wasting my life. No fight is a waste. No thought, no nostalgic remembrance is a waste. If I decide to get drunk and forget it all, let me. Don’t tell me home is here. Home is nowhere. I will never find it, and that is okay.
Let me run. Let me run. Let me fall. Let me fall.
I don’t ever want to hide or find home or cry on Mommy’s fragile shoulders because she’s fought too hard. This is my fight, not hers. This is my search, not hers. Home is a mush of memories, a puddle of past rainbows and unforgotten sand castles. Remember the sand castles we used to build. We were children. We thought everything was so pretty and so darn colorful. It still is. Every damn sight is pretty and colorful, but nothing is home. Don’t ask me if I am going home. I will build on, come and go, I will never be permanent. I will never be gone.
I will always be running with scissors, cutting up pieces and shredding diaries. And you will never catch me.

I had a dream about my brother. Then I woke up and my eyes were teary. From the crack of the window, I smelled rain and spring. I made coffee and toast and called my mother. I had nothing to say. She didn’t either.
This city is so deceiving sometimes, so seductive, so mysterious. I am myself and yet not. I am dazzled by its every element, and yet intimidated.
And I soon will leave. I have to move out, though I am surly coming back. Am I not?
Yes. I am coming back.

I miss my father.
He is even more absent than before. He sits behind the kitchen counter, head bent, a word puzzle before him. He says nothing. He closes his eyes sometimes and I smooth his gray hair.
“Don’t you want to talk Daddy?”
“My mouth will hurt,” he says.
First I assume he is joking. He often cracks jokes; it’s the way he communicates to his daughter. But, this time he doesn’t smile. He doesn’t even look up. And I feel pathetic. I’ve left and he doesn’t want me back.

My mother lost her voice today. I call her everyday from my cell phone. Sometimes in between classes. Sometimes on my way to the subway, or in between sips of coffee, or on the sidewalk where I stand in one corner and get hit by walkers. I call everyday. To reassure us both we are okay and because she is more positive on the other end of the line than when we converse face-to-face. Maybe because I am so far away she knows I need her positive energy.
But today I don’t recognize her muffled, hushed, screwed-up voice; it sounds old and bizarre and broken. I want to cry. I hang up. I tell her we will talk when she is better.
I can’t help it though. I call again later in the evening at Starbucks. I am tired and want to cry and she sounds the same. It’s almost frightening.
“Are you sick? Did you go to the doctor?”
No. She says.
I can’t do it. We say good bye. I sink deeper into the foreign couch, put my coffee aside and think of that eerie, unfamiliar voice.