Home is caterpillars you couldn’t protect and wisps of morning dew darkening the denim ankles of kids who’d step on them.

Home is a can of Yoohoo and chlorine in your lungs and wasp stings.

Home is Adderall taken with Diet Mountain Dew on elementary mornings to assist you in being “like the other kids.”

Home is belting Lady Gaga and Adele with your mother on the highway leading to her job, one that she will not keep for longer than a couple months.

Home is being unable to relate to the grief of other children of divorce, because all you’ve ever known is two Christmases, two hometowns, and two weekends a month driving down 185, and you don’t even know what you’ve lost.

Home is going to St. Anthony’s with your grandparents on Sundays, warming at the way your grandpa watches your grandma sing as if they are new lovers, and the eggs and hashbrowns at Cracker Barrel afterwards.

Home is not remembering your grandpa’s voice or the way he smiled but knowing how you felt watching him deteriorate, barely being able to stay in the same room with him, listening to your mother’s cries but not letting them see yours.

Home is attending his funeral and watching your grandma cry for the first and only time ever; it’s feeling angry at anyone who isn’t family because they didn’t know him like you did and the shame burning your face afterwards; it’s not feeling as bereft as you think maybe you should and guilt pouring from every orifice as you look into a stranger’s casket.

Home is DUIs, parole officers, missed court dates, and bags on the counters full of Jim Beams and Fireballs and cinnamon whiskey.

Home is going to bed not knowing where your mother is nor the condition she’s in, but a sick part of you hoping, the burn of her throat reaching yours, that she doesn’t come back.

Home is desperately wanting your father to stop glaring at you, but begging for your mother to look at you even once. 

Home is confiding in your grandma, a mouse among rats, the both of you gossiping like schoolgirls because she is the only one who has ever understood. 

Home is staying awake playing Jackbox until your gut aches and your vision blurs with the family you don’t share an ounce of blood with, but whom you wouldn’t hesitate to bleed for.

Home is going to sleep as your stepmom gets home from the night shift at the factory, bringing Fudge Rounds and tired eyes and kisses goodnight.

Home is speckled fur and tackles instead of hugs and teaching yourself patience with training treats.

Home is compromising to stay in-state for college, because even though your skin has always itched to leave this place, your best friend has a mom while you have a mother.

Home is sweat drifting down your skin, the thrill of riding roller coasters, and your mother not with you but spending the summer in court-mandated treatment programs.

Home is pride, because, for the first time, your mother has returned from a party sober.

Home is learning to ignore the barbed wire wrapped around your mother’s arms when she hugs you, because at least now she can give an illusion of gentle love and you are an apt audience member of her show.

Home is not forgiveness, like they tell you, but you have always been so good at forgetting, so you pretend you do not remember the slap of your mother’s hand, or the sting of her slurred words, or the tingle of whiskey on your own tongue.

Home is not letting go; it’s the fact that your mother will still never listen to you, never like you, because you are too much like her; it’s the loyalty of a guard dog, and the fact that you will always run to her when she calls; it’s the fleas from laying for too long.

Home is acceptance because right now you are bitter and unforgiving and teenage.

Home is acceptance because you cannot change your mother and maybe she does not want to; maybe the distance will find a way to draw the string between you taut, and you will let yourself fall into her as you once could, once returned.

Home is acceptance, and acceptance is isolation.