love, read, write

Sometimes I forget about this: for three years I grew up homeschooled in a van.

It was second to fourth grade. Lessons were taught on the road, taught by my mother as she would snap Trident peppermint gum while explaining concepts.

“You have to understand that what I’m about to tell you is putting you light years ahead of your peers,” she’d say, adjusting her scratched sunglasses. “America is first and foremost a shitty-- shit. We’re running out of gas.”

Most of the time, my books were in my lap, rumbling with the dirt road while my mother would drive, one hand on the wheel and the other holding her cracked iPhone 5 against the light to see the maps service. The only tables my books encountered were motel tables. Sometimes they would be nightstands where I’d move the lamp to the ground and read until my knees turned into carpet patterns; other times we’d be lucky and I would have a small rickety table to myself. Chairs weren’t always guaranteed. It’s not like we had the money to go to Hilton hotels every day. Life was always on the move.

The car, an old Toyota minivan, held a surprising amount of stuff. We had pots and pans, portable gas stoves (the kind that smells horrible when you turn it on), a box full of clothes for both of us, a box full of snacks and other unnecessary foods, another full of books. You might have passed by us on the road and didn’t think twice. A soccer mom and her son driving to summer camp.

It took me several years into college to realize that this journey was prompted because of an eviction. Only after half a decade of subconscious memory perusal did I realize that maybe my mother wasn’t the most responsible of residents during the earlier years of my childhood. At the time, I didn’t really have many other points of comparison for what an adult should be like. I was only ever exposed to her loud voice -- commands, explanations, stories. She was the first and only woman in my life for quite a few years; my image of adults, mothers, and women were warped around her bellows and impulsive behaviors.

It’s surprising that she even prioritized education -- little as she supported it -- during those crazy years. Even afterwards, she insisted on finding a decent school system to settle into (though she admitted she couldn’t really afford the top notch). College was a must. I can’t say she was irresponsible because she did put me in the right place, on the right path. Maybe for a couple of years the method was unorthodox -- expo markers on the windows for math equations, scribbling history timelines on the backs of crinkled receipts.

Given all of that, it’s crazy how quickly I assimilated right back into the mundanity of normal life. Six months into fifth grade, it was as if I was born and raised in the dingy suburbs of North Carolina -- where we ended up settling. It was as if it had never happened, or all of the things I learned during that time amounted to nothing in particular. I had gone for three years learning about worldly concepts, society, and interpersonal relationships in a Toyota Sienna, practicing friendships with auto dealers as they fixed a flat tire or projecting my curiosity on a motel receptionist while my mom searched for the room key that she’d lost.

And I’m as boring as they come, really. I work a nine to five, I have a steady girlfriend of five years now, I have a place to myself not far from where we settled in all those years ago at the end of the road trip. During my college years when I wanted to impress girls I tried explaining this part of my life to them, but most people either didn’t believe me because of my unbelievably average personality or they just got nothing out of it. If they asked me more about it, I couldn’t even give a proper summary of what it was like, nor how it really changed me or how it made me feel. It just happened, then it ended. After a while I didn’t bother telling anyone. I wasn’t sure it had happened anymore.

These days, though, I’ve been realizing that there might really be something a little different about how I see things. It’s like when they say that a lot of people take a while to find out they’re colorblind because they think that’s just how everyone sees the world. Only after you directly compare your perception of something with another person do you realize that there are actual differences to something you previously thought was universal.

Sarah always tells me I’m holding something back. I never really knew what she was saying until recently. Something suddenly clicked while I was thinking back on the three outlier years of my life. It began to make sense a little, and eventually I came to a conclusion that I had something I called “visiting syndrome.”

It’s hard to articulate quite what this phrase encompasses, but the best way I can express it is that I have a constant feeling that I am only visiting everything I experience. People, places, time, things, experiences. In essence, a hyper-ephemerality of everything.

Or in other words, I wait for things to end.

It’s both a social feeling and a metaphysical one -- maybe I can express this by saying that everything I do and everything which happens to me feels like a dependent clause. I hang tight for something to happen. Soon I will move on and more will come. Like there is always a greater context. One of my earlier girlfriends called it a commitment issue -- but it really never was one. I never thought of leaving her or anything. I just have a habit of assuming things are temporary, until --

until something. I don’t know what. I wish I had the ability to know.

I can’t really evaluate whether this is something to curse or thank those three years for -- whether it has made me wiser or more paranoid. I don’t even know if this attitude has made me any more anxious than the next person. For some people, the idea of ephemerality is simply a possibility. The uncertainty of an end prevents them from having a peace of mind about the situation. For me ephemerality is a certainty, so I dwell in it. Perhaps a bit too comfortably.

Maybe this is why I feel so little remorse about goodbyes. It is an affirmation of my subconscious assumption. I’m usually the one to offer Kleenex with a knowing, apologetic grimace. I say the words, go through the motions, then almost sigh to myself at the end because I’m done consoling people about the things which I thought were inevitable anyway.

I guess you could see it as a depressing trait. Sometimes I find myself imagining the last goodbye just as I meet someone. It’s never on purpose. In fact I’d never do it for someone who gives me a bad impression. It’s almost always triggered when I meet someone I feel I’d get along with very well. Within a handshake, I find my mind zipping through all of our encounters until our last. By the end of the it (still a first greeting) I’m looking back on our memories with nostalgia. I still don’t know their name.

There’s a flip side to it all, too -- beyond the social interactions. Because “visiting” implies there is a place of origin outside of the visited area. A place called home. That part of the word carries through to visiting syndrome because the last time I felt at home was in first grade.

That’s not to say I’ve found lots of homes in my friends’ houses in North Carolina, or certain groups on campus during college, or even places I go often during my years here in Virginia. There have been so many places I’ve been welcomed into and felt welcomed in. Yet none have really embraced my bones, touched my roots or felt quite like “this is where I belong” as the memories I have of my earlier childhood years.

Maybe it’s a feeling that was exacerbated by my mother’s sudden death as I went into college. She said she’d always wanted to see me graduate from university but there she was, in a coffin with her eyes closed and all I had was a high school diploma. I remember feeling angry. I didn’t even kiss her goodbye. That was the one farewell I never assumed would come -- to me, only my mother was immortal. She had created me. She had cultivated my memories. Perhaps she was my only real home.

But in the grand scheme of things I suppose we were all visiting her, just as she was visiting us. Even still, I wish she were here sometimes so that I could explain all of these thoughts to her. So that I can ask her about visiting syndrome, whether she knew how I felt, whether she’d felt it, what she meant to come out of those three random years.