homesick

[lauralh]

An unpleasant feeling is a wave of melancholy nearly crushing you when you realize you can't go home again, because your parents sold your home and moved away. You can't take a machete to cut down the brambles of blackberries covering everything, sweat on your lip, as you conquer the backyard. I had never felt this homesick before, but Tuesday and Wednesday morning I nearly cried about it. Hell, I went to boarding school at 16 to get away from all that crap, the unbearable heat and light and humidity and hurricanes, and I don't think many other people were less homesick than I was back then.

When my mom moved herself and her remaining children to Denver, and when I went to see them, it felt like that was home. It was nothing like where I grew up, nothing like that house where we all grew up, including my mother, but the family all being together was totally enough for me. I've never really been a very sentimental or nostalgic type for things or places, only poeople. But maybe going to Virginia where they have 20' magnolia trees pulled something out of me.

Anyone else have a demolished place they can't go back to?

Comments

[almosttruth.livejournal.com]

My mom and step-dad sold our home in Issaquah last year after divorcing 4 or 5 years prior. The place they made my brother and I move to at the beginning of my 8th grade year. I never forgave them for that. The moving part, not the selling of the house. Yet i found myself incredibly emotional when the house was sold. This was especially confusing because I was well into my late-20's by this point and it seemed quite childish to be so nostalgic. But perhaps my age is exactly the reason for my nostalgia, and thus, the ache in my heart for the loss of roots that I had always despised.

These subconscious connections to the past and the memories lost are a strange phenomenon for sure.

[hdog.livejournal.com]

My parents sold the San Jose house that I grew up in and I lost my main connection to the Bay Area. It was definitely a sad day when that happened, but I got used to my new parents place by visiting frequently and getting to know the new area as well, until it sort of became home again. It can't replace the memories or nostalgia, but it can be something new. A second home away from home.

[gfrancie.livejournal.com]

There is the house I spent most of my childhood in.
We only rented it but the house was sold (due to my father's inactivity to get the ball rolling on buying the damn place) and we moved. It was strangely traumatic for the whole family and sort of began the downward spiral of a lot of things.
The collective family dream is to one day buy it back again. Just to have. Because it was where we were happiest even though it was drafty, old and a little lopsided.

[chris.livejournal.com]

i used to machete the hell out of some blackberries when i was a kid. every house i grew up in is long moved out of though.

during a dark period I lived in this shithole on a huge chunk of land in lynnwood. it's been bulldozed and now like 20 houses are in it's place in a new subdivision. the ground isn't even the same so you can't even look and see where things used to sit. we buried a couple of cats there and i always imagine them digging them up when they built all that shit.