Monday, March 17  

Home

Vic calls home early Monday morning and tells her mum that she’s finished with yet another potential father of grandchildren. She sobs the story into her cell phone while she drives to work and lets herself feel really and truly badly for the first time since the break up.

She says she’s moved out. Into a new apartment. Out of the relationship. Such as it was. 6 months of rootless scrambling and she has come out the other side feeling like a tree that tried to take root on a rocky slope.

home: noun 1. A building or shelter where one lives. adjective 1. Of, from, or within a country's own territory.

Her mum sighs and says "Oh, Vic. Do you want to come home for a while?"

Vic stumbles on the word "home" when her mother says it. She really doesn't think of that small city, that small place where cars are assembled and shipped, where IGA cashiers go home after their afternoon shift, where Tim Hortons' outnumber pharmacies, as home. Not anymore.

She wonders where her home is in that case. Where is the heart's own territory?

Is it where your things are stored? Where you sleep? Where you wash dishes and lay on the couch and stretch phone calls out over the afternoon? It might be where your love lives, but what if you don’t have one? What if you are too cold and clumsily compiled to produce the equation of love? Where is home then?

She concludes that home is just where she is. Even if it smells like someone else’s cooking and needs a proper paint job.