I realized before I left on the two-hour drive that I had forgotten my glasses. It was dark out and the streetlights played with my eyes and danced across my windshield. Their blurry impressions of light left my mind free to fill in the details. I started wondering, as I often do when I forget my glasses, if the Impressionist painters were really just near-sighted. I know that Van Gogh had epilepsy, but what about Monet? Did he too see the world without its details? Did he too extract from this that you don’t need every fact to form the exquisite truth?
I let my eyes blur the lights instead of straining to see their sources. Out of the corner of my left eye, I followed the painted white line illuminated by my headlights just a few feet in front of me. My step-mom’s words started to echo in my head: the saying she would tell me when I got overwhelmed about the uncontrollable future, “You can drive all the way from New York to California only seeing the road in front of you.” Sometimes all you need to see is that patch of yellow-lit black pavement. Luckily, that was mostly all I could see.
I looked at the wide windshield as if it were a frame for a moving painting. Blurred McDonalds arches and white billboards I couldn’t read came in and out, barely becoming more in focus. Perhaps the Midwest highway is more beautiful this way. I could see the open sky and the glow of the full moon hanging low. I could see the reflectors on the side of the road, forming a line that made its way to a disappearing point in the distance—a point always on the horizon no matter how far I’ve driven.
This will be one of the last trips I make from Kansas City to Columbia. This is one of the last times highway I70 will lead me home. It was on this highway four years ago that I woke up sweating in the backseat of my mom’s car. I felt soaked in the August humidity and drenched in resentment. Why was I brought here? I was groggy and couldn’t remember the picture of our destination or how I should feel about it. The only images I could recollect were the tearful goodbyes compounded by my gut that ached with the pain of detachment. There had been so many goodbyes. And then the crisp night before, which I spent on the floor of my empty room in Portland. That night, Audrey slept with me on my unfolded sleeping bag where the bed used to be. The room was a different color now. The ceiling finally matched the angled walls. Fresh paint replaced its old comforting smell. My photographs, cards, and posters were gone. It was just us, my pink-striped sleeping bag from summer camp and my rolling black suitcase.
Since that night, home has been a place that is ever changing for me. But maybe that’s just the nostalgia talking. Maybe even before that, my home was never set in stone but characterized by an overnight bag that moved with me from Mom’s house to Dad’s. Or maybe home isn’t a place at all.
I just finished reading an essay one of my professors wrote called “Home is Where the Heart Aches,” and I can’t seem it get it, or its title out of my head. Home is where the heart aches. Sometimes my heart aches for Portland. It aches for the summer days that dragged on, sitting in the backyard of my friend Annie’s house listening to music, having water fights and making whipped cream from scratch. Sometimes my heart aches for New York and the month two summers ago I spent with Ben and his roommates. It aches for the scorching, miserable day when we lugged the blow-up pool (and two 25 pound weights that Ben insisted on buying) from downtown Manhattan to his house near Queens because we had to have a kiddy-pool on the roof. It aches for the summers in Baltimore when I heard crickets and saw fireflies for the first time. When I drove down the highway with my cousin Jeremy listening to Shimmer by Fuel and feeling much older than I was. It aches for the day my grandfather Poppop watched me run around the high school track near their house. “You’re real good, Em,” he told me as I circled around, shoes burning on the ground-up tires.
It aches for my vegan Thanksgiving in Kansas City. It aches for the spongy grass in Florida. It aches for the Alaskan world that I have yet to discover.
When I was a little girl I would lie awake in my bed in Portland, listening to the breeze through the old mesh windows. I would look out over my neighbor’s yard to a streetlight on the next block. Every night I would look for it. And every night it glowed yellow. Sometimes I thought of it as a star watching over me. I loved that blurred light so much as it always managed to glow through the overgrown trees night after night.
In many ways these moments of contentment will always be the home that I have in myself. Even if the places where they occurred are not my physical home. Sometimes finding home feels like aiming for that disappearing point on the highway. Sometimes I will resent it because I can only see what it isn’t, and not the elegant, beautiful, blurred painting that it is.
For now, I will continue my drive, playing games with the lights as they hit my windshield, and relishing the unique magnificence of my Missouri home.
