The day I return, a homeless man comes up to me as I stand looking up at the gilded ceilings and shield-bearing Valkyries in the main hall of Union Station. He smells of urine and drink. His white beard has red streaks from malnutrition. You look lost, he says, are you lost? I tell him I’m fine and rummage through my backpack for the first note I can fish out from the miscellany I dumped inside before I left New York. It’s a crumpled and worn five that I hold out at arm’s length with my fingertips. He only has a few teeth that wiggle when he smiles. His eyes water. God bless you, you have a good heart, he says before he wanders away across the patterned floor towards another traveler.
Are you lost if you know where you are going—just not how to get there? There is still no Metrorail service to Georgetown and taking a bus, taxi or Uber during rush hour means conjuring a level of patience with this city that I have never possessed. I stand in place weighing options while the transit goddesses stare down their unwelcoming disapproval.
But it’s early summer and the sun still shines in the evening so I decide to walk the three miles across town through a place I no longer consider home. The Capitol Building squats atop its hill and the Washington Monument remains singular and unmoved, enjoying its prominence only because of arcane regulations that have stunted the growth of surrounding buildings. I had a high school teacher who used to tell us that the game is rigged with winners and losers decided long before the players have any choices to make. Ms. McConnell lives in Los Angeles now and writes for television. I wonder if she’s happier there or just less oppressed.
I have never really liked this city. It was forced on me against my will by ambitious parents in search of greater opportunities and better lives. That’s why everyone comes here, to this seductive monument to self-advancement or at the very least, self-preservation. It’s a city that doesn’t take risks. Men wear boxy suit jackets over golf shirts tucked into khakis. Women wear sensible skirts, pantsuits and pumps. They all pull roller backpacks behind them because of subway ads enumerating the signs and evils of scoliosis as they walk to big-box buildings made of similarly colored sandstone. You can’t get lost here because there’s nothing to lose yourself in. These avenues, at least downtown, are not built for wanderers, and these monuments are constructed to inspire awe not contemplation. But things have changed if only to protect the desire to remain the same. The streets have more barricades because the streets have more impromptu protesters, a dismal lot with their posterboard signs and hoarse-voiced chants against the monster in power and his minions. There are more armored vehicles now and more police officers in tactical gear and body armor wielding large black guns. It’s a brave new world wrapped around the old one to make it great again. I think about my boyfriend in New York and how he wraps his arms around me when I have my nightmares—they are less frequent now but no less intense—or in the mornings when we are both naked and vulnerable and that vulnerability arouses him. Sometimes it arouses me too, but sometimes it is easier not to resist. He wanted to come with me because he wants to know where I’m from. I’m here now with you, I told him, but he says with me it’s a case of the more you see the less you know. He wants to meet my parents, to see the house I grew up in, to smell the bedsheets of my youth. He’s a poet trapped in a banker’s body. He reads T. S. Eliot on the subway and slips index cards with lines from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock into my pockets before he goes to work. My parents are moving, I told him, there is only so much change they can handle.
They are not home when I arrive. Mom has left a short note on the front door written in barely legible cursive that she insists makes sense: Dad and I waited as long as we could but we had to go to a dinner. I made some boxes for you and put them in your bedroom. Leftover salmon in the fridge. Love Mom. She could text but she doesn’t text when she wants to make a point.
Inside there are boxes everywhere, in the living room and dining room, all open, some empty, some half-full. I drop my backpack on a couch and weave my way through the chaos to the kitchen, where the counters are covered in dishware sets that I never knew we had. A broom and mop lean against the refrigerator door. I try to hold both of them in place as I pull it open, but they slip from my grasp and fall to the floor with a clatter. The fridge is empty except for a box which contains the salmon. There is also some milk and a Brita of water. This must be heaven for Mom—she hates to cook. I warm the brown paper box in the microwave, fill a blue tinted glass tumbler on the counter full of water and stand with my back against the fridge feeling it vibrate and hum while I pick at the salmon with my fingers. The flesh is tough and rubbery. It needs salt, but Mom has already packed the condiments.
Leaving must be difficult for them, for Mom especially. She is the one with extensive social ties, the friends she plays tennis with, the boards she sits on, the professional women’s groups she has started and grown. I wonder if my absence has anything to do with their willingness to move. Whenever we talk Dad says, this house is too large for two people, and since you never come home, what’s the point of keeping it. They will move to an apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, courtesy of Dad’s new job—a professorship and head of institute. Mom says she has always wanted to live in a place overlooking the river, even if that river is frozen half the year. She wanted me to come back earlier. It takes longer than you think to pack up a life, she scolded on the phone. But that depends on how expansive the life. Ever since I left Washington, I have tried to contain my world in the smallest space possible. Don’t keep anything that can’t be packed into two suitcases. Don’t attach yourself too strongly to people or places. My boyfriend says I have commitment issues. When we argue, I tell him attachment and commitment are two very different things. Dogs are attached, humans are committed, I say. He wants to get a dog, but I’m not ready for that. Maybe that will change after they move and I’m really homeless.
Mom has left packing tape on a stand outside my bedroom. There is also a box marked donate in the hallway. She has never been subtle in her suggestions. It’s not how she was raised, she reminds us. Her family is large and argumentative. They show and tell. Sometimes it drives Dad crazy. Otherwise my room remains untouched, the same framed posters—because Mom would only tolerate them if they were framed—the same creaky black office chair and a white desk with red drawers. Dad and I painted it when he still had time and I still had patience. It’s the kind of thing a person keeps if a person keeps things. Mom said, you’ll regret it, when I told her she should sell it on Craigslist or eBay. Maybe we’ll put it in storage, she said. My grandchildren will thank me. If you have them, I mumbled, which she chose to ignore. Mom has opened my closet and placed a wardrobe box in front of years of clothes hanging undisturbed. They smell vaguely of cedar. I have no need for more clothes in New York so I pull what’s in front of me from the bar without ceremony and prepare for a cathartic dump into the donate box. Then I see it hidden in the back of the closet where it could almost remain unnoticed, a blue-and-white windbreaker jacket with a little bit of shimmer. My breath stops as my stomach clenches and I am reminded in full force why I don’t come home. Niru wore that jacket on the last day I saw him, the last time he came over to my house.