youcannevergohome

You Can Never Go Home Again
Cliched but true

Author: Minnie
Rating: PG
Category: Original fiction
Dedication: To my father
Distribution: Please ask
Feedback:   Yes, please.
Author's Note: Living in the past is a bad habit, one I've been trying to kick for years.
Archive Date: 7/9/01

You can go home and see the house you grew up in. But it isn't the same.

The stairs in the house no longer seem so long or so intimidating.

You look at the spaces in between the steps and see, not a yawning abyss, but five-inch spaces that your childhood dolls could crawl through. You stare at the spaces, wondering why the hell they scared you so much before. The possibility of falling through them, of unseen hands emerging from them to grab your ankles, seems remote now.

You see that the wooden steps are still shiny, as though a new coat of polish had just been applied. But you don't see them gleam with purpose like they used to, the purpose being to prevent you from going up them with haste. Because haste simply isn't ladylike.

You clamber up the seven steps in three seconds flat. Then clamber back down just to see if you can make the same time going down. You do it several times just to convince yourself that they really are the same twenty-second steps, that somehow your father didn't rip out the old ones and put in new ones just to mess with your head. Your shoes thump on them with the same annoying clatter and you *know* they are the old steps.

The dining table no longer seems so wide or so high.

You reach across the table to grab the pot of soup and find your hands almost touching the other edge. You look at your hands and wonder if they've become superhands while you weren't looking. How could your hands reach across a great divide such as the family's dining room table?

You move to put your elbows on the table, despite all of your father's past warnings to "Get your elbows off the table! Did the school teach you no manners?" and find yourself lowering them and lowering them and lowering until your bones hit solid wood. You realize the table is still real, that your bones are real but everything else in between them seems *unreal*.

You feel the rough coarseness of the plastic tablecloth and wax nostalgic about all the times you spilled something on it. It remained clean, expelling all sorts of nasty messes. You look at it now and it seems faded, with errant spots of grease here and there. The mighty tablecloth, once victorious over flying plates and very clumsy hands has become just a plastic cover, dulled into submission by time and solitary meals.

You can visit old friends. But they're not the same. You're not the same.

You see age lines creasing their faces and wonder if those same lines now cross your face. You see them and theirs but you don't want to see you and yours. You don't want to see the passage of time. You want to hold on to the memories of youth, of innocence, of eternal possibilities.

You see them smile hesitantly at you and think that those smiles used to be open and bright. You smile back with teeth showing, movie star brilliant, urging them to drop the hesitancy, to drop the questions, to forget everything but those days when you used to be closer than anything in the
world.

You hear them talk about their families and their lives and it sounds like they're talking in a different language. They're telling you problems with plumbing contractors, bathrooms and thieving housekeepers and all you want to do is say to them, "Who ARE you guys and what have you done to my friends?" But you stay silent, nod a little, then wait for a break in the conversation to reminisce about days past. And when you do, they look at you like you've just said you wanted to jump in the lake naked.

You can recreate an old atmosphere. But it is never the same.

You attend a 'blast from the past' gala at one of your old haunts, the club Spectrum. You sit in the one of the low back chairs, remembering how rickety they were and you test them out to see if they still make that squeaky noise when you put your full weight on them. Squeak, squeak. Some things don't change after all.

You hear dance music blaring out from the loud speakers and realize they are the same tunes that played when you were a sophomore in high school.   You remember dancing to one of the songs with Paolo. You had a crush on him so you felt all giggly and girly when he asked you to dance. You want to get up, dance and feel all girly again.

You see the waiter come by to take your order. It's on the tip of your tongue to say a Coke because that's all you were allowed to have back in your sophomore days. Then you recall you're past high school and switch your order to a shot of tequila. And grin broadly because you feel so adult.

You down the tequila in one gulp and it burns through your throat like battery acid. You shake it off and motion for the waiter again. This time when he approaches, you croak out, "A coke please."

You look at the dance floor, filled with the nondescript gyrating bodies. Somehow they all represent figures of your past. You decide that since this is a 'blast from the past' night that you might as well wade into the sea of bodies and take that trip back in time again.

You look at around to your companions to decide which one you want to dance with. You think back to the days when you got all tongue-tied at the thought of saying two words to a guy. You smile widely, looking at the guys sitting across from you. Your eyes focus on one of them but before you can ask him to dance, your gaze shifts. To your father.

You see him sitting off to the side, in one of the nearby tables. You forgot momentarily that he was here. He gives you a slight nod. Then you find yourself getting up, walking over and asking him to dance. The little girl asking her father for a dance. Isn't it precious? You almost choke on it.   Why, why, why, you ask yourself.

You know you're not a little girl anymore. You know you're way past the get daddy's approval stage. But you trudge on to the dance floor with him, rationalizing to yourself that you are doing a good deed, that it is a daughter's duty to dance with her father anyway.

You dance the two step, going into the standard I-don't-know-what-the-hell-I'm-doing-here moves that all your friends know by heart. The two step is reserved for duty dances.

You look at the floor while dancing, looking at how the squares light up randomly with neon colors. They seem less colorful and more tacky to your eyes. You look up and see the mirrored ball and it winks at you like the ultimate cliche.

Then you look at him, at your father and he's dancing with you. Not tentatively but not all out either. You think, "Fuck it. Just dance. Just enjoy the music." You smile at him and abandon the two step, moving, swaying and shaking your body until you get swept up in the music. Until you forget who you are, where you are, when you are.   Until you forget everything and you're simply just dancing.

-End-

HOME               PINOY PAGES               ORIGINAL FICTION