there's no place like...

When I was 14, my family moved to Brownsville, Texas, a sleepy little border town best known for being the birthplace of Kris Kristofferson and the site of the last battle of the Civil War, in that order, and was (and I'd wager, still is) a cultural black hole for anyone looking to do more with their lives than go to the mall or slink across the border and immerse themselves in the kaleidescopic debauchery of Matamoros, Mexico. At 17 I left for college, coming back as infrequently as I could. Though my emotional connection to it was always tenuous at best, with each passing year I felt further and further removed from the city and its inhabitants. Eventually my antipathy turned into outright hostility, and I spent the hot summer days in my room, marking time until the day I could leave again.

No, not my room. The guest room. When I left for college, my parents gave my room to my sister, Sabrina. And for good reason. Sabrina and Samantha had been sharing a room since we moved. So I got the guest room -- bigger room, bigger bed, bigger TV, bigger shower, but the guest room still, filled with dried flowers and cowboy art and other vaguely Southwestern bric-a-brac. By the fourth day back I was referring longingly to California as home and no doubt breaking my poor mother's heart.

In 1999 my family woke from our collective stupor and moved back to our house in Oakland.
The room I grew up in was again given to one of my sisters -- again with good reason, this time to Samantha -- and when I came home from college I was once again shunted off into a room bedecked year-round in autumn colors and filled with wicker furniture and scented candles.

Ah! Then Japan, and my own decorative instincts -- or woeful lack -- were allowed to run wild. Not fancy, not even coherent, but definitely, unmistakably mine. Four years of accumulated J-crap covering every square inch of my apartment, from a framed 1000 yen stuffed into my shirt pocket by the head of the Owase yakuza for helping push his car to a gas station, to a 3-foot high plaster statue of the English teacher in the town just north of mine, given to me by my office for reasons that never really became clear, to a Christmas cartoon drawn by a 13 year old boy that included the words, "SANTA, I WANT THE BIG PINIS!" My room. Mine.

Then the day came that I packed as much as I could into four suitcases and returned home. My room, my old room, sat unused at the end of the hall, still filled with Samantha's effects while she was off at school -- but my parents were reluctant to let me move into it for fear of Sam feeling like she'd been squeezed out, so I moved back into the erstwhile guest room. I did my best to decorate it, going so far as to fill the shelves of my desk with the a bunch of j-trinkets -- a plastic diorama of level 1 from Super Mario Brothers here, a miniature bust of Stalin there. That, combined with the inevitable pile of laundry and bedsheets on the floor, and the room began to feel like home.

It was, in fact, the process of rooting through crates of my old stuff for things to further solidify the mine-ness of my room that, choked with something I thought was nostalgia but turned into something more, I came across a box of 8-mm films I'd made in college. A month later I was sleeping on my sister's floor in New York. You know the rest. I planned to stay there through the holidays, not because I particularly wanted to spend Christmas and New Year's cold and alone but because returning to Oakland for the second time in less than two months without having found a paying job felt like an admission of defeat. But then my parents bought me a ticket, and I was give the choice of coming to California or saying that I simply didn't want to come home -- not something you want to drop on your mom and dad a week before Christmas.

So, I came home to find myself sleepin in a room that has again been transformed into a khaki and burnt umber panic attack. My stuff has been crammed into boxes and thrown into a closet, while the room down the hall -- the room I grew up in, the room I still think of as irrevocably, fundamentally mine -- is now Sarah's, having moved back home to live rent free while busting her ass at law school. Home for me now is a rickety futon and inflatable mattress on a floor in Spanish Harlem. So it will be, at least for a little while.

And so, the lesson relearned. You can't go home again, and again, and again.