Sometimes I stand in place and feel very, very small. Not an easy task for someone like me, someone tall enough to touch the sky and bulky enough to plow a field. But every once in a while, I can feel like the tinniest person in the world, someone who holds still while the ebb and flow of the world streams either side of me, a blur in a world where I hold still.

In a large grocery store in New Zealand, I stood in an aisle. I was wearing shorts and an unzipped sweatshirt, my feet encased in flip-flops. I reached a hand out to the shelf, where I saw a box of Kraft cheese crackers on the shelf. I saw my long fingers unfurl over the top of the box and the muscles and tendons in my hand unfurled to hold onto the sides. I picked up the box and clutched it to my chest, wrapping my arms around it to hold it tight against me, a shield, my armor, my world encased in a box of carbs. I stood in the center of the aisle as people streamed to either side of me, a little Helen parting the waters, and I felt so small standing there with my box of biscuits.

I don't know how long I stood there for, all I know is that the world passed me by and I didn't know how to reach out a thumb and hitchhike onto the back of it.

Angus has said I seem to be making peace inside of myself with some of the troubled relationships that storm the surface of my life. He says he can see a change in me, with regards to my family, my One Person, and my thoughts on the whole situation, and I think he's right. A card has tumbled inside of me, a switch has been flipped, a line in the sand has been erased by a bare foot. Something inside of me has shifted and the new lay of the land is somewhere that I am exploring.

When we were in California this past month we stayed in Pasadena. One day we drove into Old Pasadena, the shops littered and lingering on either side of the peripheral vision. We parked up and went into Jamba Juice where we all got a thick heavenly juice drink. When Angus, Melissa and Jeff went into a shoe shop I wandered down the sidewalk a bit until something I saw in a window made me blink in amazement.

There in the window was a sign. A painted sign, one of those looks that's supposed to be nouveau antique, the whitewashed finish lying as it implies that the object is old when it's really fresh off a line somewhere. The sign sat on a faux antique table and the sun hit it just so. I gaped at the sign and felt like I'd been sucker-punched, surely the cosmic definition of a sign can't be something so literal.

I went into the shop and bought the sign on the spot. I saw it immediately in my head in our new home, placed just so. I saw it in my head, I feel it on the tip of my tongue, and I have been thinking about it ever since.

The sign reads, simply: Home is where the story begins.

My entire life I've spent chasing a rainbow over someone else's horizon. The street names I have lived on have changed so many times that even in my own memory I can't remember all the places I have lived. From a tiny tender age my feet itched to step on foreign soil and the grass has always been greener on the other side. My life has been lived in finite chunks, timelines that allay the fact that my heart and soul gets wrapped up in butcher paper and handed to the next customer.

People ask me where I'm from, and although my stock answer is Texas, my heart shrugs and says: Yeah, I dunno. Where do you want me to be from?

When I moved to England something resounded inside the core of me. Here was a place that I felt comfortable, that I felt was where I needed and wanted to be. I'm a stranger in a strange land but I have felt, from the moment I stepped out of that bright throbbing light in Heathrow, that this is where I was supposed to be. And when we found the world's tiniest hamlet of light in our little village, I knew I didn't want to leave for some time.

I don't know how I found my way here, I just know that I get down on my knees and thank god I did.

When spiraling through New Zealand I was so amazingly, utterly content as well. I felt completely at ease and remarkably happy, happy not just in the 'I'm on holiday' sense, but in a warm, wrapped way that spoke of some kind of inner contentment that they never get right on TV and in ads. I felt like I was home in a world so far away from everything I've ever known that you keep flying into tomorrow to get there.

Maybe something in me is changing, maybe I am no longer trying to outrun my own skin.

Or maybe I am lucky enough to find places that I never want to leave.

So home is where the story begins. Where the story begins, where the story begins'¦where does my story begin? Does it start with two razor slashes down the wrist? Does it start when I leapt from the world I'd known my entire life into the snowy tundra of Stockholm? Is the beginning the day I realized in the shower that Kim really and truly was dead and the rest of my life would be going on without him? Does the story begin when I got my visa stamp at Heathrow and began my world here? Does it commence with an uncomplicated move that led to a complicated world?

I can't decide where the story begins, I can't get my head around it. I know the story doesn't begin with hot steamy Texas summers, the heat shimmering off the black asphalt and the cicadas humming piteously. I can't believe it begins with military moves to military bases and military lives. I know it doesn't start with dusty Iowa fields, the corn stalks reaching for the sun and the taste of dirt on the top of the nose. I don't think it kicks off with the darkest coldest Swedish winter, me on the chair looking out the window and wondering what was next in the world.

But in the meantime, I have that sign. I have something that creates a sense of calm inside of me. I've never been a believer that home is where the heart is because I am very forgetful and keep leaving my heart in different places. Home isn't where you hang your hat, that's just an opportune hook, a peg on the wall for convenience that doesn't imply all of the history that it should do. Home has always meant something huge to me, and the sense that I didn't have one has forever tormented me.

But I do have a home. My story begins somewhere, I just need to decide when and where that is. And for once the tiny me stands in the middle of the aisle, clutching a box of cheesy biscuits, and smiles.

-H.

PS-we had to go pay for his vaccinations and arrange when to get him. It turns out he likes to sit on laps! And likes to be held! And he likes to be kissed!

I think there may be a lot of dog pics coming on this site, but I'll try to control myself and limit them to Flickr only.

I said try, of course, because Christ that dog is cute.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 07:06 AM | Comments (18) | Add Comment
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