On home.

It's Dad's birthday today.

I don't remember making too much of a fuss over it when I was young, but it was close enough to Christmas to use it as a marker. Always make it home in time for Dad's birthday, Mom said. And we would; we'd trundle back from our shitty apartments and foreign cities to come home for the holidays.  The cash Dad would stuff our stockings with when we got too old for candy.  Midnight mass and Mom's congee.

But that's gone now. Mom and Dad are dead and buried, our house on Deerfield belongs to someone else. Sometimes I wonder if that's why I rushed into marriage. Perhaps I was desperate, aching for a home of my own now that mine were gone. I learned something then, even as my marriage collapsed. You can't build a home. You can only let it happen.

I believe home is a past. A history, a way to remember who you are and where you came from. Home is where you feel like yourself – not today, but all days, from the day you were born to the day you set foot back in it. Maybe I'm blessed, because if I try hard enough, I can call so many places home. Sometimes it's at a table in Brooklyn, eating and laughing with good friends. Sometimes it's an old house in Mahwah, hearing the creak of the hardwood floors that P and I tried so hard to muffle late at night. Sometimes it's my own house in the dim light and quiet, Zevran on my lap and Alistair waddling about.

And sometimes it's a pair of headstones in a little town in North Jersey, just far away enough to make my heart ache.  And every year around this time, I hear the call in my mother's voiceless words.  Come home.