I Wait For Death Like A Soldier's Wife

Home is a two-story house in Henrico County that used to have a big tree in the backyard.

A creek with thorny vines, frogs, and a willow tree by a drain outlet.

A playset with two swings, a slide, and monkey bars long since destroyed.

A black dog following around a small child who thought she was a witch with a mother lovingly feeding her delusion.

Home is a bedroom with lavender walls and some butterflies.

Band posters of men with tattoos and piercings who sing the most melancholic music over the happiest guitar. 

Action figures and books and a stained glass piece in the window.

A laptop on the plaid comforter, aimlessly scrolling through a blue website with the smell of dinner wafting up from downstairs.

Home is movies and TV shows playing late at night, bonding a mother and daughter whose bond can never be questioned while the father and a black and white dog sleep upstairs.

Word games at dinner with MSNBC on in the background.

No one eats the same meal and hasn’t in years, but we always eat together. No questions asked.

But home is also a tiny dorm room on a campus in a swamp with rain hitting the window.

Or a Tumblr ask turned into years-long friendship from across state lines.

Or cruffins and hot cider before gossiping in the campus bookstore over Starbucks.

It can also be breaking into an academic building with unlikely friends to traumatize each other with French cannibalism cinema.

Or a geology class where you find solace over crochet in exchange for tutoring.

Or it’s in a theater where you would never miss a show unless the world was ending, and to this day, you would never miss a show.

Or it’s the lawn of an art museum over coffee and bagels while the world collapses and you find solace in the destruction.

Home used to be sitting on your pop-pops lap after a six plus hour car ride while you tell him everything you’ve been doing.

That home is 6ft under the ground.

Home used to be a coffee shop where everyone knows you and your order, and your $8 latte becomes $2, no questions asked.

That home was always temporary.

Home used to be a pile of pillows that still smelled like him long after he’s left and Excel spreadsheets for movies and ice cream documenting both thoroughly.

But that wasn’t a home; it was a house of mirrors.

The false homes were at the bottom of bottles and the end of nights where you knew you weren’t loved but couldn’t imagine anyone could treat you better than she did.

Those false homes came back around when he broke you.

Currently, home is a pile of blankets in the corner of a full-size mattress in a studio apartment that sometimes leaks water from the ceiling.

Home is an independent art house cinema where you see movies multiple times a week to escape.

Home is dreary cold days with the T screeching in the background and plans with friends to make dinner or throw a party.

Home is plans to fly back to that two-story house in Virginia to hug your parents tighter because their kid grew up too fast and left even faster.

Home is feeling safe enough to break down the walls I built to protect myself from the horror of this world.

I always want to go home.