Breath

My room is cluttered with my dreams, my passions, and my trash. The walls are covered with posters and magazine clip-outs, the floor is covered with books and clothes, and the desk is covered with papers and oddities. Cracked, yellowed, creaky – my bookshelf and dresser have endured the years of my life, and are coming to the end of theirs. A trombone and electric and acoustic guitars all hibernate in different places in my room, waiting for the day I find my buried passion for creating instead of listening. Large piles of books also build beside my bed at times when I think I should start reading more. The piles get bigger and bigger as more books are added, until they’re all inevitably put back on the shelf. Empty time is harder to come by than it used to be, with homework and music and electronics and friends and so many small distractions that eat away at the hours of the day.

My room, stripped of the things that fill it, is fairly plain: four white walls, a white door, and a white closet with a white interior. The whitish-gray carpet has a small defect: a crease runs through the middle of the room, which has never gone away even after all the time a six-year-old boy used to spend trying to push it out into the hallway. Drawings and paintings I had made – Bugs Bunny and Marvin the Martian, dragons and monsters, pharaohs and gargoyles– once adorned the walls of my room. Now the walls are decorated with posters of musicians and pictures cut from music magazines.

In elementary school, I used to race to my room the instant I arrived home, to read ravenously for half an hour before I had to start my homework. My room was safe; it was where I felt secure and comfortable. Now my room is where I sleep, get dressed, and do homework, and little more. I don’t have a place that feels safe to me like my room did anymore, because I don’t have the need to shut the door, close the blinds, and be myself in the same way I did then. My room once felt like my home, but now it’s just where I live.

The place that I call my home I only see once a year. My home is an old farmhouse in Dryden, New York, which once belonged to the first governor of either North or South Dakota. The house has been in my family for generations. Flying to it has become the most important ritual of the year for me.

Near the end of summer, I land in Syracuse at around eleven at night. After waiting for too long for Mom to talk to the rental car lady behind the computer, I finally step out into the moist, warm air, so shocking after a year in Petaluma. We drive away from the airport, on increasingly windy roads, with fewer and fewer cars beside us. I feel myself turn into a little child again on this drive, listening to the murmur of my parents’ conversation in the front seat and staring out the window at trees and darkness that slip in and out of familiarity like the remnants of a dream in the morning. What I feel on these nights is an emotion that must be one of the most beautiful in the world: coming home.

Home is a patch of land cut out of the fields and forests that surround it. Home is a pond, an old farmhouse, a wiffleball diamond. Home is the week every year when my family gathers at this house. Every inch of home brims with memories of joy and sadness. Home is a mouthful of fresh blueberries, and the second between the dock and the water, and the moment when I step off the staircase and turn my head to look at the old, creaky attic with its ancient beds, scratchy sheets, and lumpy pillows where I sleep with my cousins. Home is the splash of water from the old pump, and the crack of a wiffleball bat, and the word “fake” from a little blonde girl with a Carolina accent, before she hands you the ball anyway. Home is sitting around the dinner table with greasy hands and mouth gnawing on an ear of corn clutched in both hands.

My room is where I grew up, but the farm is my home. My room is where my body lives, but the farm is where my soul is. My room is where I live, but the farm is where I breathe. While I live in my room, I wait all year for that first breath of New York air.

Jack J