Lindsay Regan

I Want to Go (Home)

I do a search:
‌               sixty-three of the songs in my library include home in the title.
‌                               (It’s not telling because I try not to talk about things
‌                                that make me feel like I’ve been scraped out or deveined,
‌                                not even to myself, not even to he–)
Once is coincidence, twice is an incident,
sixty-three times? That’s
‌                                     (a hell of a pattern for a girl who won’t talk
‌                                     won’t think won’t act why how do I wrap my fingers
‌                                     around a number like that, make them stretch, make them hold,
‌                                     how do I say–)
about what I expected, really.
Sixty-three songs.
I listen maybe two hundred times to each,
three hundred, more,
‌                              (it depends how many times
‌                              the sun has hurt me that day,
‌                              how many hours I’ve spent locked in a bathroom
‌                              wishing zombies would come and eat everyone else in the building)
I ask Google.
‌                 Still no zombies.
‌                               (Please shut up, please shut up, please be quiet
‌                               I am so tired of voices and music and fingers
‌                               attached to my hand that are not mine why–)
Is this all I will ever have? All I will ever want?
For the world to be quiet,
for a home that feels like a song that feels like home.
‌                    (I’ve heard that watching porn will make the reality of sex unsatisfying,
‌                     and I am afraid because–)
What if I never find it?
What if reality never measures up to the song
and I end up homeless in every building I inhabit
because none is enough to inspire sixty-three songs
‌                                                                                    about the moment I open the door.

Lindsay Regan teaches English Language Arts to ninth and tenth graders in western Washington. She has been writing since elementary school, and has long believed that words have their own magic.