2.1: Almost Home

i.

It’s the same conversation that happens every spring at the end of exams: what day am I leaving, what time is my flight, how great it is that I can finally eat some decently cooked food like a normal person.

My friend, C, is sitting on the lumpy dorm room mattress in Marine Drive. I’m slowly spinning around in my desk chair. There’s a box of pizza sitting between us on the desk, three slices going cold.

“Excited about going home?” she says. It’s one of those questions that already have a scripted answer.

I watch the room move around me as I spin. My posters with the corners curling off the wall. The cardboard box on top of the dresser being used as a makeshift bookshelf. More textbooks and novels on the floor. My pillow and my blanket, piled at the bottom of the bed. My DVDs. My laptop. My lonely little phallic cactus. C, reaching for another pizza slice.

“Yeah,” I say, “I guess so.”

ii.

The air is different in Los Angeles. It’s heavy and dry. I feel like I’ve walked into gauze when I step out of the airport, the exhaust fumes almost curling around my calves. The sunset is muted here, hazier, as if the sky had been patched over with wax paper. The palm trees are familiar faces from TV screens and they’re disorienting in a way seeing Hugh Jackman spear someone with actual adamantium claws would be.

Seeing my family again is also disorienting, the picture not quite right. They don’t look like the people in my head. My dad’s gone a little greyer, my mom’s hair a little shorter. My sister’s grown a little taller and turned three shades darker. She’s wearing a skirt and little kitten heels and I wonder where the fat, half-bald baby who used to pull my hair out has gone. It doesn’t change the fact that I missed them though, and I greet them with a wide smile.

As we pull out of the parking lot, my sister tells me about her teacher asking her to say “about” and becoming disappointed when the Canadian girl didn’t say “aboot.”

“Maybe you should bring maple syrup in a water bottle next time,” I tell her, “Really make her happy.”

The exposed dirt on the hills by the freeway is pale and spotted with tough, dark shrubbery. We’re headed towards suburbia somewhere in La Crescenta. My family live in a townhouse now, since moving here from Korea. I haven’t seen it yet. I heard the foyer is pointlessly big.

In Korean, the word 집 (jib) means house and home. I don’t know which one I’m going to.

iii.

Every home comes with a unique scent. My family’s apartment in Korea smelled artificial—not harsh but mildly plastic. Like wood laminate. On Thursdays, it mixed with the smell of laundry detergent and when the front door was open, it spread out into the hall where the air was thick and hot and faintly metallic. Sometimes it disappeared all together, when my mom brought up a bag of freshly butchered fish and squid from the market downstairs.

Maybe that’s why it was never the billboards or the road signs or even the rising three-tone beep of our apartment’s digital door lock that would first solidify for me that I was in Korea. It was always after the whir of the lock and the clunk of the handle, when I stepped into the apartment and breathed in, that my body felt solid. As if I’d breathed in memories to weigh me down.

Of course, like all things, you get used to it. You stop noticing the smell when you’ve lived in one place long enough. So when I smelled it each time I visited my family, the scent was familiar and alienating all at once.

iv.

The house is more spacious than I imagined. It’s nothing like the cramped space I remember an old townhouse of ours in Toronto being—even for a five-year-old. It smells well-used, not musty, but definitely not new. I don’t catch a single lingering whiff of new wood. I feel weightless, like I’d left my body in Vancouver and it hasn’t caught up to me yet.

It’s a three-bedroom deal and none of them are vacant. There’s no closet space for me either. I leave my luggage cases in my sister’s room, knowing I’ll be living out of them for the rest of the summer. We’ll figure out sleeping arrangements later.

I trudge downstairs, hungry for a snack. I look in the fridge and there’s a pack of strawberry yogurt cups. My mom’s behind me, washing dishes.

“Can I eat one?” I ask.

She laughs. “Eat whatever you want. Why are you asking me?”

v.

A question I get asked a lot is, “It’s difficult living away from home, isn’t it?” Back in Korea, I heard it at least once a week. There was a woman at our church who went on to lament about her own daughter who left the nest, having been accepted to Penn State the previous year. I don’t tell her that my nest moved and left me behind.

vi.

It’s louder here than in my dorm room. There’s little to no privacy in a house where no one knocks and my sister punctuates every few hours with an anxious statement about how I’m only here for four months and that’s just too soon so can’t you stay longer?

My phone vibrates. Someone’s in the LINE group chat. It’s C. She’s posted a photo of our friends at a bubble tea cafe that they’d gone to yesterday. I feel a little lonely, seeing their faces through a small screen after being away for a month. Distant. I have a sudden realization of how far my life is from me, and how fragile the digital line that tethers me to it is. One of them is drinking my usual order, green tea with coconut jelly. I think about the first time I had that drink, skipping Korean school and hiding out in a forest trail near Cariboo Hill Secondary. A subtle dull ache spreads through my muscles, telling them to move. It’s homesickness.

A text bubble pops up under the photo.

C: We miss you, bb. Come back!!!

I text back. me too! can’t wait to see you again in august.

C: That’s too far away ): Come back sooner.

I smile and then sigh. I’m being pulled apart.

vii.

I eventually learn what each cupboard in the kitchen holds and I’ve overtaken a small section of my sister’s bookshelf for my own things. It doesn’t take long for me to stop noticing the smell of the house, but all too soon I’m back at LAX, about to leave.

My family stands behind me, waving. I take a few steps and then look back. I take a few more, then look back again. It’s an effort dragging my body away from them, towards the security check, as if an anchor were tied to my feet. (Or a boyfriend in L.A., as my mother often wishes.)

But I do make it to the boarding gate, because I have a flight to catch and because there’s a tugging sensation in my skin, urging me forward, back to Vancouver.

viii.

YVR is just as surreal as LAX was in the beginning of the summer. The dark green carpeting, the Aboriginal art, the familiar nature motifs Vancouver is so often costumed in. I’m in Vancouver again, but it hasn’t registered yet.

When I arrive at Marine Drive again, my dorm room is exactly as I left it. It smells like a hotel, though maybe not as fresh. It’s that inhabited yet uninhabited quality hotel rooms have that keeps it from becoming a home. It says you’re only a transient guest in a long line of people, who have lived and will live in this room; you’ll be forgotten soon.

I leave my bags by the door and lie down on the bed. I curl around my covers that I’ve had since Grade 5—three houses ago. It’s quiet here. My cactus doesn’t say a word.

I text C. i’m backk.

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References:

Tveit, Aaron, and Kerry Butler. Seven Wonders. Catch Me If You Can Original Broadway Cast. 2011. YouTube. Web. 12 June 2014.

Big Letter Greetings from Los Angeles California Postcard. N.d. Antique-ables, Beverly, Southeast, TX.Rubylane. Web. 12 June 2014.

“LINE : Free Calls & Messages.” LINE. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 June 2014.