It’d been, maybe, decades since I went back to the home of my aunt and uncle. It’s not that I didn’t miss them, because I did, but I didn’t know how to be there anymore. I loved (truly) being a “baby” with them—before all my… “confusions.”
It took several “puberty”s, and I was so awash in so much of the world.
Then, I went where they went. We slept in the same room and I enjoyed falling asleep again to their murmurs and eventual even breathing.
My partner was coming for the first time but wasn’t yet there. In truth, I could and maybe should have done more to describe my home world as their first alien landscape and ecosystem.
I didn’t earn it, but they came and sank into my homecoming like the next logical layer of pigment in an oil painting.
Friends, I slept and ate beautifully for many days. My family, new and old, ate meals and cleaned dishes and told jokes and watched trash and laughed and slept well.
I really liked it. I didn’t feel like pollution for the first time since I can’t remember.
