Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Family, Home.

I always feel something inexplicable snap. It may be just leaving the city, but going to meet my family, something changes. My internal monologue shifts, and I suddenly race to justify myself to myself, anticipating some future. The result is almost always silence. I've come to expect a kind of quiet reflection when I visit my family, my parents in particular. Meeting them provides a kind of baseline, a way to judge where I've been and where I'm going.

Part of the silence comes from my several selves, each with their own ineffable and inexplicable mythologies. I exist in several different places, and even more moods, and I have trouble merging. I even wonder if it would do me any good. Inevitably, things come together - when I changed schools I needed to explain my college and debate self to my Austin life to defend the move, and to take stock of how far I had come. Part of my self-aware maturity (see previous post) involves introducing my several selves to each other, of bringing them together to shake hands. I miss the sense of growth, of dynamism that comes from reinvention. At each juncture that offers me the opportunity to explain one life to another, I'm tempted to lie, to avoid committing one living, growing self into the voice of my old, permanent roots. And really, that's what family means: your anchor, the unchanging foundations which make a compelling claim on your identity, no matter how you change.

Being around my family, my habits change. I become meticulous and clean, washing myself and dishes regularly, following up everything with practiced good manners. I acquire a kind of deliberateness that I lack when caught in the moments of my other spheres of life. My body reacts in strange, contradicted ways. Without fail, I go to bed early, and not merely out of boredom. Somehow, I become tired, as if all the stored tension from my day-to-day is released and floods my body. I can never tie down if I'm hungry or not, going from an empty stomach to a bloated hugeness without warning. I feel myself suddenly susceptible to illness, a variety of bodily discomforts spring up to greet me.

I sometimes wonder if they feel a sense of betrayal. "Look at all we've done for you yet you never call..." I expect the recriminations, but they never quite come. Maybe this is one step towards an answer to those pointed, unasked, nagging questions.

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