I just hate going home.

People find it strange that I often say that since I hail from one of the mega-cities of the South.

Chicken and waffles!
Sweet tea!
Turner Field!
Black History!

They cry out. But they don’t understand that my utter refusal for wanting to return to the place where I bandaged my boo-boos and learned to tie my shoes has little to do with the city’s attractions or offerings.

I just hate going home. To that little old house right there on the edge of the culdesac. Do you see it? The one with the unkempt lawn and the 1989 Honda in the driveway? There’s a trap house next door. The mailman never stops there.

I have one of those families that you would have thought Tyler Perry etched in a notebook on his back porch: a drama-filled action pack of five plagued by an extended family miles across the Atlantic Ocean. Arguments about money, hate, and greed spillover into dinner table conversations. Accents boom. Voices burst. Rage lingers in the air with each 60 cent calling card.

I rarely call home anymore. It’s bad. So bad that the act of punching in the numbers gives me a strain of heartburn that I still can’t seem to shake. So I don’t do it, in fear that my fingers will quiver so uncontrollably that I will drop the phone at the first sound of a dial tone.

Do you hate the people there? In the place you call home?

Not necessarily. I love them. I do. With all their idiosyncrasies and issues.

We’ve all got issues. Errrbody got issues.

But I can’t get over the endless calls to actions, the hopeless transference of dreams lost. The unscaled desires of a better future — unrealized, untouched. It’s a boiled up pressure-cooker in that little old house on the edge of the culdesac.

I’m not even the oldest. Can I get some breathing room, please?

It could be Houstalantavegas for all I care. It could be the road to Tara. A backwood cabin on the edge of Red Top Mountain. As excited as I am to fill my escapist dreams with new memories of the place I adoringly call “home”, there’s still a shockwave of dread that permeates through my chest when I recline my seat at takeoff and watch the red “no smoking sign” hazily blink on and off…

Just hold on, baby girl. We’re going home.

Liane

Image Credit: Kevin Hsia