This is something I wrote before going home to visit family a few years ago. I live far from my family and only see them once a year. As you get older, you start to understand that you stand outside of the circle of your family when you miss so much time with them.
'Nebraska—a month from today: I have to go
home. I want to go home. I need to go home. I hate to go home. “You can’t go
home again.” It’s been said so many times, and become such a cliché, that it
has started to compile a dry irony that makes it nearly tolerable to express
again in Literary circles.
Visiting home is like visiting ghosts. My
family isn’t dead. In fact, go to a family gathering, and you’ll probably find
me the least outgoing in the bunch. I mean that they have stopped growing,
developing, and changing for me, as I know I have for them. I remember them the
same way that I remember my dead grandfather—I didn’t get to attend his
funeral, you see, so he is still alive to me. My family is forever young,
forever stuck in one place. And when they demonstrate their evolving person to
me, I wonder: Are these the same people? Are they who they say they are? I am
confused. But I am also home. I’ll have a beer, a chat, and a hug on the patio
with my dad—a happy Hamlet, if there could be such a thing.'
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