Homeward Bound
I have a line from a Neruda poem tattooed on my arm, under a line drawing of a ship. It’s the first line of this, the final portion of “Nocturnal Collection”:
Love, it grows late, and the shorelines are lost.
A day like a tatter of tablecloth drying
flaps in a circle of lives and extension.
All things that live give some part of themselves to the air.
Intent upon atmosphere, keeping close watch, come the beggars,
the lawyers, the gangsters, the postmen, the sempstresses:
a little of every vocation, a humbled remainder
that works toward some destined completion with us.
I have looked for it long — vanquished, no doubt,
by the evenings — and go on with no arrogance.
I got the tattoo about a year after I moved to Korea. The previous year, when I had begun seriously considering the move, I took a last-minute trip I couldn’t afford to England and Scotland to see a few friends. I needed to get out of New York, partially to check and see if I needed to get out of New York. Nearly a decade ago, I stood out back in a cobble-stoned alley behind a pub in Manchester, smoking in the dark with a friend and telling him I was scared to leave New York, because I was scared I would just keep leaving things after that, and I didn’t know when it would stop.
It’s ridiculous now, when I look back on it, because I was 22 years old.
A year or so later, I got the tattoo as a riff on the classic Sailor Jerry “Homeward Bound” design. In a way, I was still very scared about finding “home,” but swapping the text for the Neruda line was my way of celebrating the searching more than the finding, of making my peace with where I was, and where I wasn’t yet or may never be — of going on with the possibly vain attempt at finding a destined completion, with no arrogance.
These days, I feel like my self has two versions, neither one of them false. There are other, more false — but functional — selves. But the two I feel the greatest tension between now are the one that is finding a home with B, and the one that has found a home in B. Which is to say that it’s a process. Because I don’t honestly believe that home is ever really found.
I didn’t go home — to B’s home — with B this holiday, because I needed to stay here at home to prepare to go home — to my home, in Texas — next week. On top of all of that, lately, while we fall asleep, B talks about moving to Berlin or Prague. I look around at all the furniture. I’ve sold everything at once before. I’m flooded with thoughts of a third language. But I’m always willing to try.
In the back of my closet hangs a thick red and black flannel shirt with pearl snaps and an ancient Wrangler tag, at least 30 years old. I was wearing it that night outside the pub in Manchester. Some things you have to carry with you. Other things, if you’re honest with yourself, can always be left behind.
