I don’t put a lot of stock in the stuff most guys do. When I do, it’s usually dialed back. Sports, either playing or watching, haven’t ever been my thing. I go to the gym, but I’m not on that bodybuilder grind. Shoes and clothing have always been about function and my vague, evolving notions of style over any kind of status the shoes bring me. Not to look down on guys who like any of that stuff, different strokes for different folks, and all that, but if there’s one kind of guy I could see myself being, it’s a car guy. I’d make one hell of a car guy.
Of course, the only car I’ve ever owned is my family’s silver 2011 Toyota Prius. I specify the color, make, and year because I’ve heard from improv teachers and writing professors alike that specificity equals funnier or better writing, respectively. The only car I’ve ever owned is a silver 2011 Toyota Prius with an interior of various shades of gray, ranging from Sickly to Depressing. The front bumper has a visible hole in its right corner and duct tape holds the broken bumper to the car’s body. There’s a yellow origami frog I made at summer camp on the dash right next to the EZ Pass I inherited. In the glove compartment, there’s a 3D printed TARDIS and my registration. The trunk, though empty now, held my saxophone and graduation cap and gown for many months after I left high school for the last time.
It’s a piece of shit car. It’s the type of car in a movie or TV show that would demonstrate a moral failing of its owner. A cruel metaphor of environmental storytelling, trying to tell the audience that the driver is broke or the driver is simple or the driver doesn’t have the time, energy, or moxie to keep their car clean. This character would not be fit for the main focus of the show, obviously. They would be relegated to a side character or comedic relief. And you could tell all of this because of their quirky, though ultimately shitty car.
But this is not a TV show, and I am not that character. At least, if this is a story that’ll be told someday, I am too busy living it to worry if I’m the main character or not. See, I’ve intentionally led you astray, my friend. Yes, the car is a piece of shit, and all of what I’ve said is true, but I’ve left out the good parts. When I came home from college for the first time, the holes and colors and mares were the first things I noticed too, but I forgot to tell you about tanks of gas I could stretch over weeks between grad parties. I forgot to tell you about the late-night drives with the windows down. And I forgot to tell you that I told a person I loved them for the first time in that car. It’s not a bad car, and it’s definitely not a good car, but it is a place I call home.
I hope that I can call you a friend. I’ve called people friends over less, after all, so if you’re willing to look me in the eye and listen for as long as you’ve got me, I’m more than happy to bring you under that tent of being a friend. I would like to talk to you about some of the places I’ve called home, if you wouldn’t mind. Over the past few years, I’ve found many. I carry them with me, and I believe we’ve been put on this Earth to help share each other’s burdens, at least in part. So come with me; maybe you’ll find a new home for yourself. Back to the car.
I call my car home because of the ritual, which I’ve been pinpointing as important in recent months. Definitions of home tend to center around comfort, and I’ve found few comforts that come remotely close to the comfort of consistency. The ritual started my senior year after I got my license: pushing down the brake, pressing the start button, and praying to the inner workings of the machine for just another day, another 20 miles. And the prayer was always answered. I find myself clinging to ritual in times when the ground is less solid than it was before. My senior year was one such time.
My parents’ divorce rarely comes up in my writing, not because it was too dark to mention but because it really turned out fine. Of the millions of people with divorced parents, my experience was one of the least cataclysmic, I’m convinced. It definitely wasn’t an earthquake, but I let myself think of it as a slow tectonic shift. The ground was certainly less stable, but I could hardly call the process violent. I went from having both parents in a home in my hometown to having another home in the city my suburb orbited. Still, I spent most of senior year with my eyes looking out of state, and the only place I felt was getting me closer was the same place where I was, literally and figuratively, in the driver’s seat. I call Milford and New Haven home, but when you’re going back and forth each night with a bag of clothes in the trunk, the bag feels more like home than the new house or new apartment.
Really the feeling I’m circling with this talk of ritual and shifting ground is control. I lacked control with my new homes and my finished college applications, and my car was the one place in the world I felt a sense of total control. No, I didn’t really grasp the mechanics, but it was still my car. My speed. My phone cranked as high as possible to fill the space left after it could no longer connect to the speakers. My windows down. My friends I chose to give rides. My high of squeezing one last trip out of an engine close to empty. My week full of 30- or 45-minute drives to wherever I was needed because God knows everything in Connecticut is 30 or 45 minutes away from everything else.
But of course, summer ends as it always does, and we find new homes to carry with us. I wouldn’t fault you for thinking my next home would be my freshman year dorm. Unfortunately, I can’t say my corner of a three-person room (somehow the better of the situations in our suite) ever felt like home, at least not in the way my car or home home does. If home is where you feel in control, I usually looked elsewhere to find it, and if home is where you feel loved, we found out pretty quickly that the room was held together by nothing but the duct tape of convenience.
That isn’t to say I didn’t find homes in Manhattan, quite the opposite. My friends’ dorms and apartments always felt homier, though saying somewhere is homey really only translates to I can see myself being loved here. No, in actuality, I found homes all over the city. I have a tendency of finding people who can make places feel like home, even for an afternoon. I found homes on the High Line and that far-too-fancy Starbucks on 53rd and on a late night bus heading north out of the lower east side and at both the Raising Canes and Krispy Kreme in Times Square. I found homes on the 4th, 7th, 12th, 22nd, and 32nd floors of my dorm, among some others I don’t forgive myself for forgetting. I found homes on couches and in conference rooms and backstage in a scene shop. When I look at the vintage map of Manhattan my dad got me for Christmas, I see an island filled with tacks making a constellation of spots where I’ve loved and been loved in return.
It is here where I realize I’ve led both of us astray, my friend. I could sit here all day and ramble on about the homes I’ve found. I could tell you three albums that feel like home, and maybe someday I will. I could tell you that I’ve found homes in a church basement in Norwalk for a summer and at the bottom of shot glasses and in diners all across Connecticut’s shoreline. But those stories would be hollow without the friends who made them feel like home. Those albums only feel like home because I heard their music at a concert with a person I love. That basement was only home because of the people who invited me in to tell a story with them. That shot glass and those diners are only home because there was a friend on the other end of them indulging with me. And really, the ritual and prayer I found in that Prius’s driver’s seat were only ever about getting to see the face of a friend one more time.
I would like to wrap this up with a definition of home, tie a nice bow around a thinly-veiled love letter, but I can’t. Home is where you feel whole. Home is where you feel in control, or loved, or welcomed. Home is where your potential energy is lowest, knowing you have nowhere else to return to for a night. Sometimes, home is where you slept last. Home is where the heart is! Home is a house! To borrow some words from Blake Kasemeier, home is where everything sucks the least. The truth is, I don’t know what a home is. I know the high of knowing better than your Check Engine light and watching it flick off. I know how it feels to be let go in a way that makes you wonder how hard the person was holding on in the first place. I know desperation and I know I haven’t earned it. But I don’t know what home is.
So I offer you these notes, friend. I offer a thinly veiled love letter and a map filled with tacks, carving a constellation out of concrete. All I can give you are the pieces to a puzzle I don’t know the shape of. Thank you for sitting with me, letting me share some of what I carry. I hope you can return the favor, and maybe show me your own map some day.