volume one hundred and nine
what i have left
📍This volume started in the London Writers’ Salon’s monthly social, hosted by Lindsey and is thanks to one of her brilliant writing prompts: What have you left?
Returning to my first Canadian home this month, I was overwhelmed by the fact that once upon a time I chose to leave it. Chose, once again and certainly not for the last time, that there was more out there. I decided that there was more I was destined for. I was convinced that there was more to be seen, done, explored, taken over, and to be proven. There was.
Here is how it always went: I pick up, run away and attempt to reinvent myself. New place, new job maybe, new look (even if subtly or these days not so subtly, goodbye grey knitted sweaters forever!), new home decor after parting with the last in the previous stop, hey, maybe even a new sexuality.
All of it is true, all of it is me, none of it is a lie. It is just another version of me. It is just another attempt to find the most me there can be.
All of this was cheerled by my alcoholism which convinced me the problem was not at all me but my surroundings and circumstances. It told me that once I got there or did this or met them, everything else would fall into place. So, it told me, just keep running until you find it.
When I got sober, the craving for drink slowly faded, and along with it, slowly but surely, the craving for other things did too. I began to need less in life to make me happy. I still crave — long even — but for something different.
When I left my first Canadian home I was bold, courageous and adventurous but I was also egotistical, drunk and driven by the desire to have the best, be the best, achieve the best, love the best, be loved by the best, earn the best, wear the best, live by the best…
Returning again, in another phase of my ever-evolving life, I was immersed in a place I existed as all of these things but now with this ‘difference’ about me.
You know what I crave now?
I crave bumping into people I know wherever I go, but not just anyone. The kind of people who greet me with a warm hello, maybe twenty minutes will pass in chit-chat, and maybe there will be a hug without hesitation. I crave everything within walking distance, most importantly the water. I crave live music matinees. I crave human touch from friends within an arms reach. I crave slow Sunday mornings in the sun and silent company. I crave handwritten postcards in cafes and friendly post-office workers stamping them for me. I crave solitude and words written, to you, dear reader. I crave ice cream cones while looking at water views.
Walking around my first Canadian home, what I realised broke my own heart.
It took me just a few hours to go from “I am a fish out of water, I feel so strange here as this version of me,” to “You had all this. How could you ever give it all up?”
But I did give it up.
In giving it up I am able to experience the heartbreak that would never have existed if I didn’t take the chance. It is a heartbreak that only exists when you care so deeply that you hurt so deeply when it is taken away (or given away).
If I never cared, I would never have gotten hurt. If I never left, I never could have missed it.
If I never left, I wouldn’t have found a different job that made me want to stay in the country. If I never left I wouldn’t have found myself alone during lockdowns, stripping myself back to nothing and rebuilding piece by piece to rediscover the writer and creator and traveller and beautiful queer human within me. If I never left, I never would have hit my bottom the way I did and my sobriety would not offer me these gifts of nostalgia — to be honest, if I never left, my sobriety probably wouldn’t even exist. If I never left, I never would have been able to daydream of the concept of “home” and have that bring up two images in my head:
The front balcony at Nan and Pop’s on a summer afternoon in the sun. Nan and Pop sitting at the table, me standing beside them leaning on the railing, and Dad sitting on the steps. All of us face the traffic while we talk to each other and we greet every passer-by with a wave or maybe even a conversation. The phone rings and we all pass it around catching up with one of the many people we love, hours away.
The dull lighting of Bearly’s House of Blues, on the crowded dance floor by the graffiti-covered bathrooms, The Mellotones sweating up a storm on stage, me surrounded by friends, singing at the top of my lungs, a hand of a friend — any friend, so many friends — outreached ready to spin me around.
Neither of these memories will exist in this exact way, ever again. I will never exist in this exact way ever again.
In their new versions, just as me in mine, both of these homes await me whenever I want to return to them, over and over again, and that never would have been possible if I never changed to crave something less but oh so much more. Both of these homes await me whenever I want to return to them, over and over again, and that never would have been possible if I never left. Both of these homes await me whenever I want to return to them, over and over again, and that never would have been possible if I never stopped running.
Lovely reader, what image comes to mind when you think of home?
hi, lauren deborah! is a reader-supported digital journal. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. If you would like to support my work, the best way is by becoming a paid subscriber. 🧡🧡🧡 Comments, likes, the chat, shares, listening to my podcast and kind messages are all other ways you can support me, too.
✨✨ In a special edition, three journal entries from my last big move that feel as accurate today as they did then, have made it into these sections this week to replace my usual “three things…”! ✨✨
here is something I struggled with this week:
📓 March 1st, 2022: Not me stress-eating cereal at 10:30pm. I CAN DO THIS. I’ve done it before. With less life experience AND more stuff! I can whittle my life down into what I can’t part with and have it fit into my suitcases. I can!! I will!!! I’m going to, and it’s going to be so bloody amazing!!! One month to go!!!!!
here is a blessing from this week:
📓 March 15th, 2022: She did it again. She stripped back life to suitcases almost 8 years on. I’m so proud of myself. The growth in me since doing this last time is HUGE! Despite all my beautiful (and sentimental) possessions, I’m willing to let them go. Go to better homes. Go make others happy. Leave a little piece of myself with those I love. Spead my love, lighten my load, and know that what I need in order to have the life I keep pretending I want is actually (physically) very little! It’s all inside my heart and soul and with those I connect with.
here is a goal for the coming week:
📓 February 16th, 2022: Dear Lauren: I’ll take care of you. Love, Lauren.
pics or it didn’t happen:
I love you. Now I am off to admire the carpet on my floor — you know just stare at the walkway that has appeared at the base of my bed — because I cannot believe I got through all the piles and piles and piles of things I needed to sort for this next chapter. I’m going home.
That pic looks like a store I would totally lose myself in and possibly never be found again. In a good way.
There's a bittersweet to what you say about leaving home so you can return to it. I never had that. I was always searching for home.
I left where I grew up the second I could, that was never going to be a home to me. I've moved a lot, lived in a bunch of different places, most of them not for long.
But I lived in LA and, while I had to leave and my circumstances while there weren't great, I loved the place and I've never been able to go back, it's been almost 20yrs and I still want to. Maybe not forever, but I'd like to be able to immerse myself again, with better people around me (and I do have those better people now - LA friends who I didn't meet til long after I left). I left the person I was with, but the place has stayed with me.
I lived in Nottingham for about 5yrs. That was so close to being a home. But the people that almost made it that way left because they had to be elsewhere, the place I loved to hang out and write changed hands, and I wound up going to Uni at 26. It's the first place I recall true sadness on leaving, though. And the time I spent there involved a lot of breaking and rebuilding, and there were always friends around.
i left there though and wrnt to Keele Uni. I didn't live on campus (too old for that level of student nonsense, plus disabled), but I spent so much time there and got involved with so much. There were friends (including one of my tutors, who actually came to the wedding), and stuff to do, and I wound up as a major part of a couple of things. I also left a legacy if a group called Haven, where queer people of faith and no faith could meet together. We started it up in my final year, in secret because certain other groups would have lost their shit, but now it's advertised openly.
Keele is also where I met Cuddles. It was a few years before we got together, but we were friends. I met my best friend there too, and a couple of others who I managed to keep (I do that, I move on from whatever and keep the best people I found - it means I have a wide and eclectic group of people!).
But home? I called where I lived home but just as a word, it was never where I belonged. Home is Cuddles. She's where I'm supposed to be.
What you said. Every. Single. Thing. This is me, too. Always craving something more.
I have finally learned that home exists wherever I am happy. Sometimes this is an actual place; sometimes it is on a page; sometimes it can be found in a dog’s kiss, an ice cream cone, a kayak, a sunset.