Homeless

It's so hard to feel at home here. I caught myself doing little chores tonight in a familiar sense. However, that sense was uncanny, and only tonight do I understand truly the meaning of that word. Freud may be full of it on a lot of accounts, but his interpretation of The Uncanny is certainly worth reading. ANYWAY...it would be right for me to feel at home here; this is my home, in theory. So many things are the same: I washed dishes so many times in that sink, I got ready for school every day in that bathroom, I spent hours paging through books, deciding which ones to read now and which ones to leave in a dusty stack for another month. Yet, so much has changed, so much is foreign to me, and I am a stranger in the place I knew best and best knew me. Mom observed tonight (about me and Jean Guy), "Wow, you really hate him, don't you?" I couldn't agree with that statement. I don't hate him. I don't. As much as I resent it, I love him in a lot of ways. I associate him with a lot of hurt and hard feelings and therefore adapted the "live and learn" approach to self defense: If you always get sick when you eat ice cream, stop eating ice cream/If you always have burns on your hand, maybe you should stop playing with candles. Well, I stopped investing any emotion in him. I find it funny, though, and somewhat to my delight that the emotion I cannot surpress and kill is love. That's something beautiful about me, and it makes me happy in a sort of resigned way. Still, it's not easy answering the phone and having everyone, including her father, assume I'm Gabby or flopping down on a beautiful and victorian but antique and dainty sofa you know would never survive the strain of hot, late-night, sneaky teenage sex or imagining packing a school lunch on what is now my mother's deco-minimalist kitchen. Maybe I've just outgrown these things, and this place is a reminder that I am not yet accustomed to my new life/status/self/etc., and so I feel a stranger everywhere.