My father doesn’t have a home.

He was born in a New York City borough, to a house hidden between high hills and distant highways, in the days before the grass gave way to asphalt in the lot behind his house. The Long Island Expressway was built there when he was three, so he grew up in the place where the pavement met the playground, amidst engines never loud enough to silence his mother’s screams.

His mother raged at a husband who was too gentle to raise his hand or voice to answer her. She screamed about how they would leave each other. She screamed to move him, because if he moved, even to hit or silence her, she would know he loved her, and didn’t want to lose her. And though his hands had made rhythms out of plywood and car engine machinery, she screamed and screamed but could not make them move.
So my father grew up in the noise between his parents’ silences, squeezed between two older brothers on road trips to the water. He thought if he could just find a quiet place, he could hold his family together, so he looked out car windows and into television sets for a home he never found.

He burrowed into the attic of his house, at 12, and stayed there until he was 33, and all the noise was gone. In the silence, he learned to meditate, work, live alone and love.

My mother met him, loved him, and made him move.
They married in another state. And I was born there.

But my father says he met me before I was born, in a house on Cape Cod, inside himself. He was deep and quiet like the sea outside the window.

He says he can remember nearly drowning on vacation as a kid, when he sank down to the bottom of the turquoise world, and everything was finally quiet and peaceful. He says meditation is like drowning. He’s meditated for 28 years. He meditated in Cape Cod in a cottage, while his wife was skinny with a baby in her belly, and he talked to the baby, inside himself, and told her he’d find her a home.

So they moved to Florida. There, my father grew warm and happy. But he grew to despise Florida when its constant construction of houses and highways began. With everything always growing out and up, nothing was quiet long enough for him to burrow into it and make it home.

So my father gathered about him everyone he loved, all the strange neighbors he had taught to meditate and turned into friends. He said we could all move somewhere together, call it a commune, grow our own food, and there wouldn’t be any highways anywhere that we could hear.

I guess nobody ever really feels like they’ve got a home, because we all began to look for one everywhere where land met turquoise water-- in every state bordered by sea. We flew in shuddering jets, where I’d look out scratched windows to see tiny, shining houses below and see us living there. We drove toward perfect homes on road trips where I’d fall asleep between two screaming parents, hoping that if I kept them together, they would stay still long enough to notice each other.

They never did.

The search for a home began when I was three, and it never ended.

We climbed mountains and walked along rivers through the backyards of people we’d never met. We slept in dingy hotels and drove hours through desolate towns, jotting down the numbers on for-sale signs. We stayed in cold, whitewashed log cabins in winter, just to visit the mansions nearby. We befriended dozens of realtors and hundreds of home owners. But nothing they could offer us was exactly right for us, even though it seemed okay for them. So we lost thousands of dollars in non-refundable deposits on houses we determined weren’t homes.

The longer we searched, the harder it became, because after a while, we began to love the search itself. And we’d seen so many small towns and pretty houses, they needed to become more than that in order to be worth the sacrifice we’d make of giving up our search.

The small towns now needed gourmet restaurants. The houses needed barns and cottages and wrap-around porches. And the fields nearby needed wildlife sanctuaries, because it wasn’t worth living anywhere that could ever get ruined.

It seemed as though my father ruined everything last week, when he found us a home.

Burrowed between mountains and wildlife sanctuaries, the mansion had a barn, a cottage, and a wrap-around porch. The streets of the town below were lined by used bookstores, a river, and gourmet restaurants. As we wandered through it, we felt like we were home.

My father and I sat down next to the river, and he told me the town it flowed through would never be my home. He wouldn’t move there, and he didn’t know why. Maybe it was the mountains, he said. In between them, he felt sort of trapped.

And I thought, I feel trapped. I have lived in anticipation of an upheaval and a home that has never come, and I can’t live with the idea that it won’t. This was your dream, but it has become ours. What did you want if not a home to fill yourself with? What did you want if not a turquoise river to flow through you, that you could sink down inside? What did you want if not everyone you love to stay still with you, in a house with you, forever? And now you have us and you have found a place for us. And you won’t give it a place inside of you.

But the things I screamed were less poetic than that.

I screamed that I share a tiny room with someone who sold her house to buy the last commune we didn’t buy. I screamed about all the things his dreams and decisions were doing to all of us.
He yelled that I was selfish, and fell into silence.

And in his silence, I waited for him to figure himself out the way he always did.

But he didn’t. So for the first time, I forgot myself, and learned to forget selfishness, as I reached for him. I discovered how to find him, where he was sunk down inside himself, and staring at the scene before us.

The river and the mountains and the house were just too big for him to burrow into, and they were growing in his mind, up and out, as he realized they wouldn’t be his home.

He was drowning, and I began to drown with him.

My father had thought that he had to find a house for everyone and all the love he had for them, and hold beautiful scenes still within its sunlit windows. But now he couldn’t bring himself to burrow into the house before us because that would mean having nowhere quiet left to go when the scene outside grew houses and highways that grew away from us. We would never let a house hurt us the way we had been hurt as kids, sitting in the backseats of cars, watching the waves outside the window wash away everything but hope. Highways and arguments were always reaching higher, growing faster, in the air above our heads. So somewhere in our search we had decided to never stay anywhere long enough to hear them.

I sank into the silence with my father, and felt myself grow closer to him, when searching for all those houses, I had only grown away. Together, we saw our lives hidden in the hills and mountains that would never mark our home.

And suddenly, the scene became more beautiful than it had been before, because we didn’t need it anymore: My father has found his home drowning in meditation. It is gone only when he reaches his head above the water.

So he and I decided, in the silence that lies at the bottom of rivers and lives, to search for our own silences as well as we can, and in them, to perhaps find a home.

Labels: By Ana