You Can’t Go Home Again - by Jenny Sinclair
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLYYou can’t go home again. But you do, tearing up the highway to get there just in time. And there they all are, the faces and the names. Names without faces, floating in the air on a willy-willy of small-town gossip. You should know the names, but it’s been so many years.
They’re here for a party. So are you, the one who went away, moved to the big smoke. Just one who went away; there’s nothing special about what you did.
Acquaintanceships last renewed so long ago that you could have had grandchildren since then: they shouldn’t qualify as friendships. The cells in your bodies have changed three, perhaps four times: you are different people. You must be, at least, or else why did you leave? But where a conversation between strangers would be polite, full of tiny probes on social matters, politics and whether, in the end, you could trust them, here, you are connecting in seconds.
You sit on the couch next to a woman with sad, dramatic eyes and strong features: big nose, lips too large for the space allocated to them, so they push out a little. Her hair is inappropriately long for her age. So is yours. You kiss her. It’s been two, maybe three decades.
“But she remembers you, says you were a sweet, smart young thing. You weren’t. You were anxious, and amazed at her and her wild crew, and you clung to the edges of the pack like the confused child you were. ”
But she remembers you, says you were a sweet, smart young thing. You weren’t. You were anxious, and amazed at her and her wild crew, and you clung to the edges of the pack like the confused child you were. The clearest memory you have of her is stopping by her house on the way to a party and watching as she rimmed her eyes with kohl and dabbed strong-scented oil onto her wrists and neck in lieu of a shower. You tell her this because it was so long ago, and any detail from the past is precious. So much is lost.
She has a child the same age as yours – they are older than you were back then – and you both speak of the love that goes to waste when a teenager scorns their parent. Of how it is somehow your duty to suffer the pain of it. To keep on loving them, silently, in case they fall.
Everyone is drunk. One man tells you, in front of others, how he used to fantasise about you when you were sixteen. You tell him you don’t want to know, that you’ve just now met his wife. Tonight people are speaking honestly, existing on a plane where if it’s true, then it’s not too terrible to say. Another old, dear friend says: ‘I’ve kissed his wife,’ and your special sense of offence is rendered ridiculous.
This happens, when you come back here from time to time – men you once knew declare they lusted after you. When of course you were not that kind of girl – not sexual, not a player. You had your boyfriend and your crushes but you never dreamed this was going on, this thing, different from random street harassment, this behind-the-eyes quiet observation and desire.
It doesn’t matter.
There’s a woman at the bar with long black hair. You knew her well, tangled as you were in relationships with the same charismatic, damaged man.
But she doesn’t know you at all. You take off your glasses, smile brightly, and wait for the light to dawn. Still nothing. Then, slowly, a name, a mutual friend. Still, not that man. You say his name and her anger rises, not at you, but at that image from long ago, at what he did to her. He was so damaged, you say. She asks the inevitable question and you say no, he’s dead. Suicide.
The world is full of damaged people. Mostly you hide it; they hide it; everyone hides it. But with these people, who were there when the damage was done, there is no hiding.
“The world is full of damaged people. Mostly you hide it; they hide it; everyone hides it. But with these people, who were there when the damage was done, there is no hiding.”
A woman you don’t know, a beautiful person with glazed alcoholic eyes, starts talking about poetry. You recite a little Shakespeare; she comes back fast with Yeats’s poem about drunkenness, hitting hard on the accents:
‘O mind your feet, O mind your feet,
Keep dancing like a wave,
And under every dancer
A dead man in his grave.’
There is nothing you can say to that. The bar packs up and the party moves on to an apartment not far away, where wine populates the tables and smokers stand on the icy balcony. The dark-haired woman produces a golden bottle and cries: ‘Tequila’. You convince her it’s not the great idea she thinks it is.
You’re not as drunk as most of them; you can still hear yourself, you’re still editing your words. But you’re drunk enough, and far enough away from home, to say things that usually you only think; things your city friends might judge you for. Things that, said at home, would have consequences. Things you just want to say to someone. So why not to these people, who represent one of the lives you could have had, but didn’t?
Time does that thing where, suddenly, it’s late. You go out onto the smoky balcony to kiss the guest of honour goodbye, and he says to another guest, of you: ‘her vibrations are always with me’. You see him maybe twice a year. There have been periods of two and three years when you haven’t seen him at all. But he knew you and loved you when you were fourteen. You and he will always be together in those moments of formation. You can’t go back. But the past is not past. It is always with us, waiting.
“You can’t go back. But the past is not past. It is always with us, waiting.”
Your friend, the guest of honour, was obsessed with Doctor Who and that blue box that could take you anywhere and anywhen. Your friend’s house was full of it: long scarves, posters, a life-sized model Dalek. That house is someone else’s now and tastefully decorated, soulless. IKEA-ed. But it exists: in his memory and yours. The country town of thirty years ago is here, in this room of drunken middle-aged people talking about their teenage sons and their old lusts and troubles.
You’re not driving back to the city. Not after drinking, and not so late. You’ve taken a room at a seriously grand hotel – Victorian trimmings, mahogany bed. It’s not that expensive, but one night here costs as much as you paid for a month’s rent last time you lived in this town. The carpets are plush and the drapes are heavy. Your room is at the end of a many-cornered corridor lined with polished timber doors.
In bed, you feel disconnected. It’s dark, silent and so lacking in sensations that you could be falling through space and time and just before the world disappears you think: I could wake up anywhere at all. ▼
Photo by Regina Valetova
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