going back, one day
i've been thinking a lot lately about an old mall that i used to pass by on my most frequently taken bus route, the one that took me to the rec centre at 12 and to high school later. this old mall, near my grandparents house, was a dead mall for all intents and purposes. it was, generously, half-occupied, and the storefronts that remained felt so stunningly like fronts, a realization i only had once i was old enough to understand what a front was. i wish i had had the foresight to, at literally any point, take pictures of the clock store and cobbler and strange discount clothing stores that caught my attention, because part of me wants so desperately to return to the mall and to see it again. i cannot physically or contextually return to it, because it was torn down to the foundations and rebuilt. the best i can do is look through the measly gallery of photos that exist within the google reviews, mostly images of the strange pale green interior of the food court, decorated with odd placements of black and white checker board trim, and a colourful mosaic floor. i miss this bizarre and quiet mall, and for some reason, it just feels unbelievable that i can't go back inside. like, yeah. i understand that it's been entirely torn apart, brick from brick from foundation, and that the structure which held the idea of the mall no longer exists in any capacity. but can't i just, please, go poke my head in one more time?
this feels stranger, but less emotional, than my desire to return to the home i knew in my parents house. when visiting my parents, although there is a palpable distance and feeling of dreadful nonbelonging, i can still, in an uncanny way, return. what am i supposed to do when the building no longer exists, in any way?
i moved out of my childhood home exactly a year ago. i grew up in one single house, never having moved a single time. white siding, blue trim, chokecherry tree out front with juniper and peonies directly underneath it's shade. inside, the space which contained all the comforts and joys and pains and growths of my first near-quarter century.
i have glimpses of comfortable images that pass me by sometimes, shots of the warm glow of the living room (from the fireplace where i'd sit on the hearth until the skin of my back itched with the radiative heat) and the kitchen (from the orange-yellow 3000K lightbulbs i insisted that we buy, because i didn't like the cool blue tinge. they feel sterile). i see, briefly, how the orange light washes over the dining room table, over my mother and all the crafting she did at the same table where we ate. sometime we would push aside her sewing or her cardmaking or scrapbooking to make room for the food, careful not to spill or flick specks of dinner onto her work. my father was always the cook out of us all, the dedicated recipe inventor, to varying degrees of success. adventurous in his ideas and skilled from practice and an affinity for anthony bourdain, rather than any particular intellectual pursuit of chefing, i can smell the vastness of the spices occupying the corner pantry, overflowing and disorganized (indicative, broadly, of the rest of the house, too) and so richly infused with our whims. a random tea, spice blend, herb, nut. all bought destined to play their small part in the composition of the whole, our whole.
i sit here writing this now, in a home truly my own, wishing i was there in the pantry, my shoulders squared between the mason jars of seasonings and the noodle corner (the rack containing vermicelli, ramen, pasta of varying shapes) and inhaling deeply, and imagining that i could hear the muffled television on the other side of the door as my nose is filled with the scents of the kitchen. i want to step out and see the scene, softened by the light and by the overwhelming sense of belonging in this space. i want to be held gently by the memory of the orange, by the murmur, by the ease.
but since moving out, i've not found this again. i visit when i can, not often enough, and find myself a stranger and a visitor. this does, of course, upset me to some degree, but there is always this feeling in the back of my head of this unease being a passing feeling, like if i just wait long enough, til the right minute, i can return to the exact moments that i long for. like my moving out is some big game of pretend, and that the curtain will fall and i'll be back where i belong. i'll be back in my childhood bedroom (now my mother's office) and my bed will be there and the daisy wallpaper and dusty pink curtains will be back up and i'll be home.
the fact of the matter is that i can return to that room, unlike the mall. i can very well return to that physical space. but it won't be “my room”. it will be walls which once housed my room, physically and contextually, but the nature of it has changed to now being “the room which used to be mine”. my room does not live there any more than i do, and it ceased to be my room when i ceased to be it's resident. even if i were to set up an air mattress tonight and sleep there, it would not be my room in a way any more meaningful than the way a hotel room is one's room. something about the room, familiar all the same, has been lost. and i can never get it back.
my grandparent's house, by the mall, still stands. it's been painted, by its new residents, a relentlessly ugly black, discordant with its own roof and trim and all the other houses on the street. and i wonder, from time to time, if it would be inappropriate to ask the new residents to let me inside to observe. the answer is yes, no doubt, i have no business nosing my way into other people's homes just because my grandparents and my father once lived there, and i in turn, had lived so much there. i once again find myself utterly unable to return to this place, so clearly cut in my mind and yet divorced entirely from me now. do they know? do they know about the sunflower-decorated kitchen that contained some of the blandest, most unappealing snacks ever know to a child, that the house once always smelled of earl grey tea and tasted like rye crackers, plain almonds, and fig newtons? of course they don't. do they even care? watching strangers inhabit this space which was once so meaningful to me is such an alien feeling – they are puppeting around playing house in a place which feels so unshakeably not theirs. this is deeply unfair to them, i am aware. but i carry such heartache about the past that it feels like a slight against my grief for them to be so frivolous with and ungrateful for their unfettered access to somewhere from which i am barred from entering.
and the thing is i know if i, in some terrible act of impulsive selfishness, ever found myself inside that house, the quality of being “my grandparent's house” would be wholly lost, in the same way that my bedroom had lost its quality of being “my room”. until such a time however, the house exists in a perpetual quantum state of schrodinger's housedness, where inside, maybe some small traces of my grandparents remain as i remember them.
and i think that is what this is really all about.
my grandmother died very suddenly. and my grandfather has been dying with a terrible, agonizing slowness that feels impossible to think about sometimes. gramma slipped into unconsciousness after a rapidly oncoming infection, two days after christmas, and was dead before the new year. bubba (a horrible term of familial endearment, set into motion by my oldest cousin when struck with the inability to pronounce 'grandpa' as a small child) has had a creeping dementia overtaking him for years, so long before even the death of his wife that we, grittily, decided not to bring him to the funeral for fear that he would not understand. or maybe understand too much.
the ends of their lives have been so pointedly different and have contained in them such intensity in their variations on grief and change and readjustment that it makes me sick with ache to sit with.
my grandma, entirely, completely, utterly impossible to return to. i haven't visited the spot where her ashes are even once since she was interred there, now nearly 3 years later. she is there in the same way that old mall is. out of reach in a concrete way, a firm way, the kind that i want so badly to overcome but can't, no matter the size of my want. my grandpa, still there, if only physically. visiting him is visiting a shell of what once was, a kind of husk, or container, now empty of the meaning and comfort and recognition. i am a stranger and visitor to him, too. he does not recognize me, does not warmly accept my presence as familial in a similar way to the way my parent's house now exists with a degree of separation between myself and the warmth it once held.
and in the middle, their house. extant, and tantalizingly close, but still out of my grasp in a very real way, inhabited by someone else who cannot recognize the evidence of my lost grandparents as it has been impressed into the building over the decades that they lived there. scars of damage, coats of paint, echoing resonance of entire lives lived there. i resent them, for being so close to these evidences that they are myopic to them.
i am learning, slowly, how closely intertwined grief and growing up really are. every thought i have feels new, as if i'm the first to go through such a trial, but i know this, too, is part of the process. everyone feels as if they are reinventing grief when they feel it, new, new, and new again everytime it is revisited. people and places are different. or maybe they aren't so much. but everything hurts to miss, and it's just so easy to miss so, so much.