or, a love letter disguised as a homecoming
or, a homecoming disguised as a love letter
By Brooke Jin
Darling, do you remember when we stopped in Ithaca, New York on our road to home, your home, the one you never tell people you’re from? Small-town kid turned city girl, tale as old as time. We drove for ten hours, my hand on your thigh, your hand on the wheel. Your broken sunglasses on your nose. (Sometimes I look at you and never want to turn away. But this isn’t that sort of love letter.) Upon your homecoming, we visited both the place you were raised and the place that raised you, and you told me how weird it felt for me to be there, how weird it was for you to be there: present collapsed into past. This wasn’t quite home, there wasn’t a place for you there anymore. You know the words by now: once you leave, you can never come back. Jamais, jamais, so it goes.
I’m sorry. I tried to write about home but could only write about you.
Or how about that time I read you Cavafy in a used bookstore in Manhattan and cried? (When I think Cavafy I think Catullus, think Take a long position, swell the / Abacus with kisses. Wrong time, wrong place—I know. But you unweave time and stitch it back together for me.) You held me and I told you that home, my home, was the only place I could ever imagine growing old in, but that I could wait forever for that moment of return, for the illusion to break. As long as I was always a visitor I could still imagine a place called home: future collapsed into past. So it goes.
Forgive me. I think love letters are as much about the desiring subject as the object of desire. I love you through loving the act of loving you, through loving loving you.
But for now we’re in Ithaca, New York, and we pass the place where I read Butler for the first time, talked about the impossibility of the I. I wonder if it’s ever possible to know myself, know where the boundary between self and stranger, subject and object, is laid. I want to know you. We eat steamed buns and I think about Ithaka, mythic, namesake. Always more a journey toward than a coming home. (Would that moment of arrival have had the same sweetbitter taste without homophrosyne, that reunion of lovers? I cannot imagine, anymore.) I wonder what it’s like for a homecoming to take ten hours, ten years, the rest of my life. But, here, for now, you’re mine, the way Ithaca is mine, the way Ithaka is mine—signpost, sinner, bruise in my ribcage. Here, I watch as you stand knee deep in the gorge. The leaves are so green my eyes ache.
Brooke Jin is a first-year planning student and mechanical engineer from New York City.