I have established
One thing
(As things are often established).
One does not want to leave
With the knowledge that things will not remain
As they were.

The idea of home
(For it is but an idea)
Is perceived as a constant, unchanging
Entity.

To go means
To come back to nothing.
To go means
To lose home
(Or the idea of it).

I do not want to go.

Nonetheless, a child has little traction
In the ways of of its parents.

I would hardly consider myself a child
Anymore.
How can you be categorized young
When the elders act younger?

They had surpassed me
Falling down.
We did not all fit on Floor 1.
I was shoved into an elevator,
Bound for Floor 2.

I had seen them at
Their weakest,
Their cruelest.
I had seen them in fist-flying tantrums
And house-shaking pouts.

I knew going away
Would make coming back harder.
But maybe I needed to be a kid.
And maybe they needed to grow up.

The charming thing of the elderly is
They’ve been around so long
They would like to stay.
No risk -
No danger.
Habits.

I walked into their two bedroom house spying the
Same paintings over the
Same cream mantelpiece next to the
Same rose-infused vase
That had squatted there as long as I could remember.

This was a home
You came back to unchanged.
You might alter, but it did not.
I shamefully envied what
My father had
And refused to give me.

Under their properly-trimmed apple tree,
Her wrinkled hands
Tuck a reading me into a fluffy blanket.
“I feel like a princess,”
I giggled,
Childishly.
She smiled,
Accentuating the creases colonizing near her lips,
“You are.”

And I had forgotten this truth
In forgetting.
Just as they had forgotten me
In “remembering” themselves.

Maybe I had come here to remember, too.

I was still the blond girl
With bouncing curls,
Prancing the length of her room in a tutu and tiara,
Bopping a small head to Taylor Swift tunes.

Maybe they had forgotten,
But I had not.
I would not.

So I spent my summer
Going in reverse,
Finding myself in who I was.

They picked me up at the airport
(Together, yes, but infinitely apart in all the ways that mattered.)
I could taste the tangible tension between them.
My mother pursed her lips,
Willing them to keep their biting nastiness within
While my father struggled in suppressing the rolling of eyes.

I attempted to see them through the
Admiring eyes of a six year old.
What ever had happened to Superwoman and Superman?

I was greeted blinkingly by the realization
That they were but shepherds
More lost
Than their sheep.