long way home

do we ever go home?
i remember once i did, and a few times before that, when i was younger. my dad used to carry me into our house, lay me down in bed, and tuck me in, this from the same guy who regularly cussed out the refridgerator. i remember going home from university and feeling safe and sound and sane. then i got crazy every time i went home. then i got sane again. now i feel neither.
when i was in high school, i used to run around the yard and chase myself through every room in the house until i ended up falling asleep on the couch. i remember being strange and silly and flighty but interestingly, constantly changing. it was like watching a kaleidoscope. home was where that all melted away, eventually, through pain and struggle and love and too much food. at the end of the night, sleepless or no, the sun rose and the birds sang. i could find thomas the cat waiting in the wings, ready for me to finally give up and say uncle. say that here i am, home again, ready to fall into the arms of those i love.
then my dad got lymphoma. i couldn't trust the one thing i had for so long, that my dad, yelling and being stupid and funny all at once, would catch me if i asked. he would tell me that things would work out, take me to a movie if i was sad and lonely. he would drive me around for hours until the screaming voices in my head (not real, metaphorical) finally shut up.
then, in a minute on the phone, he was gone. not really, but the he that could hold me up. suddenly, i had be a flying buttress, not the tapestry. home was a new set of worries, concerns, not a place to fall away from things and the shiny performance of life. a new drama, a new play.
one i could barely follow.
then my mom got cancer too, and my siblings call me all the time to tell me how we have to be there for them, but when i see them...when i see them, for a little while, we're just the same people we ever were, fucked up and gloriously complicated, kind and hurtful, well-intentioned or not. for a minute, then it's gone. i'm the oh-so-sensitive, sexually and religiously ambiguous creature treading carefully around the respect for the dead, for the will-be-dead-soon, for the strangely imperfect ghosts of other people i'm not supposed to love too much.
but they're alive, and i don't know how to deal with that. that's the funny thing, thinking of going home for easter. i can handle being alone, being hurt, and being lost; it's easy enough to give up. but, like the new spring, it's so fucking hard to just begin again, to accept that maybe things will turn out all right.
people fuck you over. people are shitty. people are dumb and make mistakes. so how do i deal with people who, despite my insistence, say welcome home, things'll turn out okay, you'll see, get some rest and it'll all clear up. even if they turn around and screw you over by accident.
so simple, so ridiculously more complex than giving up.
so i'm going home for easter, and i don't really want to. i don't want to face my parents who seem more and more ghost-like, like voices in the back of my mind.
the other day my father answered the phone, and the tone in his voice sounded like it did when my mom is in the hospital but he doesn't want me to know. it wasn't that though, he just didn't know where she was (groceries). but i was so ready to let go. so ready it scares me.
the world is a shitty place. we've transformed everything so that even the environment is killing itself---the ecosystems and plants that can't live with human structures will fall, then the human structures that can't live with those plants will die, and then we'll have to start all over
but the we will change----the frost outside is killing the buds of spring, and in my mind, i've watched the people i lvoe die a million times---so it comes down to this: why am i so willing to let go? is it something in our society? is it my own pessimism (the same voice that tells me my friends will betray and abandon, despite my better instincts)?
or is it something more sinister, something in the system i'm trying to succeed in? seomthing that tells me i'm an adult now, i'm changing, i have to become something stolid and solid and cruel, something sad and lonely, with a wife and 2.5 kids some day, who never does the million things he dreamt he might do, someone who looks at his parents, says goodbye when they wrinkle, and moves on to the next fad---someone who can say goodbye in the time it takes to drive to work, to give a paper
and start the work day all over again