She’s Leaving Home

Getting what we need is always bittersweet

This piece was featured in the Late Winter 2020 Monadnock Underground print quarterly.

Leaving home hurt.

The thing about home is that it’s warm and completing, but it’s so hard to grow within it.

I had my routines, I had a total identity, but at eighteen I had the completely consuming urge to throw it all away, to burn my skin and my favorite socks, to dye my hair and my most commonly-touched phrases blue, to forget my first name.

Hailsham is a beautiful pit of emotionally stunted people, half a mile walk from the nearest pub and practically nothing else. England provided space — not space to erase and redo, but space to breathe. We traveled through a Work-Away program, 5 days a week, 5 hours a day. We chopped apples and turned them into cider. We joked about it feeling like a prison. We joked about it being a religious experience.

We cried while picking runner beans. We soaked up every ounce of alone time. We made bread and savored cups of tea. We dreamed of baking muffins and cakes with reckless abandon, and we discussed people back home like home didn’t exist anymore.

Home didn’t exist anymore.

I knew that once I returned to the same place it wouldn’t carry the same weight, when I saw the same faces I wouldn’t feel the same comfort. It’s scary to catapult out of childhood, but there’s no way around it.

We left home, and it hurt. We snipped pieces of our fingers off and felt numb, we let a grey-haired giant tattoo meaningful words on our forearms, we danced to new-wave 80s pop in the basement of god’s waiting room and hung halfway out of a stranger’s moving car. I called my mom crying, I called my mom laughing, and I drunk dialed my dad. I ignored my best friend for my own personal well-being and whispered dark secrets to a spider in the largest apple tree. I’m not a dog person, but I coexisted with 14 of them. I hid my loud tendencies underneath the borrowed bedsheets. I adhered to a strict schedule that wasn’t mine and ignored the weird birds I couldn’t recognize.

I left my country and I left my home. I left my childhood and I shoved adulthood up my nose, I devoured my insecurities and replaced it with a strange confidence that was 50% new and 50% used. I refused to adjust myself to the time difference and quit my burgeoning nicotine addiction. I joined a dating app and immediately regretted it, and I discovered a deep-rooted fear of horses. I swallowed my pride and let someone else take the lead with the transit system (we only got lost every other time).

I wasn’t anyone’s daughter in England, I wasn’t the oldest of three, I wasn’t defined by what was cemented in my bones. To be invisible, walking the streets and not be searching for familiarity — to be swimming in what I had no business knowing. It was odd, like leaving my body and watching my head bob up in a sea full of strangers from above. We tried to keep our voices soft. We tried to lull our accents into background noise, terrified to lose that invisibility. You can’t be out of place in a home, even when it’s not your own. Populated places swallow you up, they give you chameleon faces and a name tag no one has time to read.

I relaxed and let hours wash over me, I stopped counting the days and let the weeks wash over me. I let time run away and away and back again — only to let it lapse the second it got slippery. I was there for a year, but only for a second. I was there for a month but for much longer than that.

Eighteen began with the need to become someone I couldn’t see in the mirror but ended with the need to just be, just to breathe, and to tie strings between familiarity and newness.

Leaving home hurt in a way I needed to be hurt.

Leaving home let me just be.