Homecoming

My bedroom was covered in a layer of dust when I got back. My mum has been in, changed the sheets, given it the cursory tidy round every so often, but the endless piles of books scattered absolutely everywhere had a light film over them. Evidence of my absence for the last two years.

It’s a funny thing coming home after such a prolonged time away. Every time I’ve changed rooms for the last week i’ve had a rush of “oh, i’m home” come in. Go from the living room to the kitchen to make a tea. From the study to the living room to talk to mum. from upstairs to down. from downstairs to up. from the kitchen to the garden. It could be any time between now and 2005. I could be any miscellaneous age. Time settling round me again like dust, or like the fresh (read: bitingly cold) autumnal breezes eaking their way through the gaps around the double glazing windows that have been there since they were installed in 2003. All versions of self encapsulated within a single home, imprinted on the walls, smiling from school photos and holiday snaps. In fact there aren’t any school photos in the house anymore, I just imagine them from when they used to be there. Because in my mind, the house itself has all its layers on – of paint and wallpaper and sofa upholstery and curtain and carpet. All iterations of the last 20 years of interior design, encapsulated in the house, all at once.

The only thing that truly marks the passage of time is my own ageing, that of my family, and how faded the spines of all my books on the shelves have become from facing the window. Every day the sun has come in and wound its golden squares around the walls of the room. Becoming, for the last two years, the room’s only permanent inhabitant. I could move in a very leo tangent and equate myself to the sun, but i won’t.

Do we fade away, do you reckon? All of us, slowly existing with less intensity, our skin and hair and selfhood eroded by the weight of living. When we come back to well-known places, or places that know us well, are we lesser versions of ourselves? More weathered, less here, further along the road to the inevitable jumping off point – or fadig out point. Is it a Niel Young lyric? it’s better to burn out than fade away? I think I wrote about this when I wrote about dying full of potential, and i don’t think we do fade out like the covers of my books. They faded because they weren’t touched around and moved. Their colours got a little less bright, yeah, but like the books themselves are still as vibrant. I’ve got a copy of watership down that’s so dogeared I’ve slotted the end pages in at the beginning because they keep slipping out. There’s a metaphor in that I’m sure. I don’t think people work like that. My room faded out because there was no one in it to keep the dust from settling, no one in it to think and breathe and fill it with life – and I think that’s the only time people fade out too. When we let the dust settle on them, stop thinking of them, stop talking to them.

I wonder if, because of the way consciousness works, people atrophy in our minds from the last moment we saw them, so that when we see them agian we have to reconcile the version we had of them in our heads with the version we see in front of us. Like… sure you’re going to say that that’s obvious. But I don’t know if it is until you think about it. I wonder if we keep people in a little bookshelf in our heads. The sum of our relationships written in proverbial ink and paper, and the longer we leave them there undisturbed, shone on by the sun through the windows of our eyes, then they fade (too heavy a metaphor? probs – im imagining the inside of my brain like a hobbit hole with book lined walls and discarded outfits i didn’t like all over the floor).

Like… the people I knew at school are on the bottom shelf tucked into a corner. The ones I never saw again. The covers of those books are faded and hardly visible now – and i wonder if its because with people, unlike books, taking them down from the shelf and leafing through their pages, and looking at the cover and turning them over in our hands, and (crucially) putting in new entries in the blank pages that follow the last entry, makes them all the move vivid. Every time you look at it you make it more intense, you outline the illustrations and write the words down again. You add to the diagrams and you put in new stuff like ticket stubs and €198 receipts for cocktails or in jokes. Something about Stollen, or trainee apprentices called felix and cecil.

So, to that end, I don’t think we fade away at all. People, I mean. I think we can fade out of the lives of others – left mouldering on their mind shelves, faded from disuse. But we, ourselves, we don’t really fade at all. We just tack on extra volumes. Recolour the covers. Put on new dust jackets to keep from getting mussed. Rewrite the best bits of ourselves, tear out the pages we’d rather not carry with us. With time we become clearer, sharper, more in focus. More ourselves. I feel this even more coming home, to my real home, after such an extended period of being away. The village doesn’t seem smaller, or less than, in the way it does when people novelise the homecoming of others. It’s exactly the same as it always was. But I move through it in this different way where I have, at last, become sure of the self that stands up in my clothes, and wearing my shoes. A more vivid, more cemented, more real version. recoloured. dusted. polished. fresh.

Anyway – I dusted all my books yesterday. Took them all down and looked on the insides of them. Found things tucked in there like 23rd birthday cards, or letters from an ex, or old earings, or train tickets, or notes to self from 2009. It’s such an odd feeling – to feel little letters from oneself scattered in a room that’s yours – but feels like it belongs to some long forgotten ancestor – here but not here. Because I’m here instead.

This is getting away from me now.