You can’t go home again

I just spent a week in my hometown of Honolulu helping my mom start the long and complicate process of downsizing. She currently lives in a house where I spent the majority of my childhood, a large property that’s becoming more than she can manage.

This road is about a mile up the hill from said house, a street I’m utterly familiar with, every turn, every bump, every tree, every view. It’s a road I have run thousands of time since my early teens, and one that makes me feel like I’m truly home.

It’s also unbelievably beautiful, and it’s not lost on me what a tremendous privilege it was to spend my formative years in such a tropical paradise.

Growing up in Hawaii was in some ways shielded me from some realities – I think in particular of the fact that as a mixed-race child I had no sense of otherness, because being “hapa” (or “half”) was so normal there. In fact I never really felt a true delineation along racial lines until I left for college in Boston, when I realized the rest of this country found race to be a basis of division.

I was also shielded from weather as a determining factor in everyday life, but I feel like my 6 years in Minnesota might have made up for that…

That’s not to say there weren’t downsides – island fever is real, particularly on one (Oahu, in my case) that you can circumnavigate in less than three hours. Going back home throughout my adult years I’ve always been struck by the exceptional remoteness of this archipelago out in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, and how tiny the islands are. And Oahu’s size and isolation gives rise to a populace where degrees of separation go from 6 to 3 or 4, so it was sometimes difficult to have a sense of true privacy.

As the years have gone Honolulu has felt less and less like home, more a place steeped in a fading familiarity that is far away from my present reality. But my childhood home always gave me a sense of grounding, an intimate connection to the people and experiences that formed me. It’s not without conflicted emotions that I helped my mom sort through carefully preserved childhood memorabilia, old photo albums, books, memories.

It’s the eternal challenge – we wouldn’t be who we are without our past, but we can’t fully be who we are in the present unless we can leave that past behind us.

Sometimes when I think of that house in Hawaii my heart aches – for a time that will never be again, for a past that has often become idealized in my mind. And yet this gives rise to the opportunity to remind myself that while the physical entity of a childhood home may not always be, the memories of everything that home ever held – those are forever mine, something to cradle gently within. And that can never be taken away.

They say you can’t go home again. I say that home is always with you, and that comforts me.