home (but how do you know?)

I remember, late one night, several years ago, hanging out at Tim Murrah's Metropol (which was downtown, in a basement under the Montague Hotel) and running into Hank, who I knew very well, but with whom I was not in a relationship with at the time. As close friends do, we struck up an intimate conversation about what was foremost on our minds, and hashed out some ideas over several drinks (probably rum and coke, which I was drinking at the turn of the century because I liked the way the caffeine mixed with the booze). I was, during the last few years of graduate school, struggling with the concept of home, and I remember asking Hank if it was easier for someone who lived in Houston all his life to feel at home in the city. I was trying to figure out if my struggle, and often times failure, to maintain a sense of belonging was a result of having moved here from somewhere else, or if one could be native to a U.S. city and still feel that dislocation. I was going on at length, imagining alternative realities in which I had made the decision to stay in Philadelphia, only I would have been doing exactly what I was doing in Houston, but in a much more familiar cityscape. Fishing for a simple, "I think you're right, Chuck," I finished my description. Hank looked at me, patted me on the shoulder, and said something like, "You might have to ask yourself if you have *ever* felt at home, even when you were, presumably, most at home."

It was a difficult truth to face. I remember being super-irritated when he said it. In fact, it stopped the conversation, if I remember clearly. But I have thought of it often since then, and it has been on my mind since returning to Houston, which feels very much like home to me, now, and so the latter part of the response is haunting me: ". . . even when I am, presumably, most at home."

Someone famous (and I can't remember who) once said that feeling at home is all about the act of forgetting. When a place is strange to you, you must go through a process of forgetting, which begins when you actively remember its details so you don't get lost, so you can get your bearings. You *must* remember: The street will have tattoo parlors. You will take seven steps up the walk. The key will turn in the lock like this. The room will be painted an early morning sky blue. There will be little green vines on the windows. The back burner of the stove will not work.

You must remember enough so that you can begin to forget that you are remembering. The more you forget that you have remembered, the more familiar a place becomes, until you get to the point that you have totally forgotten because, in fact, you now know it. (I know this sounds like that passage from Faulkner's Light in August, but that's totally different -- isn't it?)

Is it possible to know a place so well, that you can actually feel its, um, energy? A few weeks before we left on our trip, I came home through the back door, as I always do, and had an immediate, acute sense that someone was (or recently had been) in the apartment. I called out, "Hello?" Leaving the back door open for quick escape, I slowly walked into all the different rooms, looking. I opened some closet doors. I pulled back the shower curtain. Finally, I noticed the front door to the apartment (which leads to the building's front door) was locked, which was unusual since Hank and I always keep it unlocked. I stood there, with my hand on the doorknob, wondering if it was actually possible that Hank or I locked it that morning. I made a mental note to ask when Hank got home. When I turned around to stretch out on the futon, I saw a mysterious envelope on the coffee table. I picked it up, and it read "Upstairs APT -- 1 Key." Everything settled back into place. The landlord, who rarely comes by, let himself into the apartment, dropped off a key so we could show the upstairs apartment, and locked the door on the way out.

There are two, interrelated, and perhaps obvious inspirations for this post: 1) Listening to and watching Melanie as she endeavors to find a place of her own, and as she learns about the city for the first time, has been a form of remembering what I once learned to forget. 2) Likewise, it has been an equally as uncanny sense of "Who's here?", since she has temporarily set up a home-base on our futon.