When we are going home

You who are settled here
So confident in your mass and volume
That what you touch will yield to you
Resting in the place you inhabit
Thinking it is yours

You are just a visitor.

The couch, the mattress
The tresses of hair on a pillow
Evidence of your decided belonging
Your rootedness in this time

You are just a visitor.

In the places you feel most at home
You are only passing through

In the places most hostile
You are only passing through

You will go back, one day, to the before place (where we once were and didn’t seem to mind?) and look back on here: What a vivid dream I just had.
Or recall it as a town you visited
and saw a little of.

Or you’ll remember nothing. At all.

Of how you:

Unpacked your roller bag and hung your black down coat, flung winter from your mustard scarf. Opened the fridge. Cracked a beer and forgot that You don’t live here.

Deeply rested. Deeply worried.
But always confident: it’s yours.

It was never yours.

And will you look back on a magnificent trip?
Once — and a lifetime.
Or return and do it all again? Ad infinitum?

And we go days without addressing this open wound of a mystery?!

Making plans. Doing taxes. Emailing,
A future ghost.

Because you know, we are always emailing: a future ghost.

I can’t believe we don’t know where we are going
when we are going home.