Home

Home packed up and left,
slipping into the boy's suitcase
and hopping a flight to somewhere else,
somewhere far away from you.
So you wrote letters everyday for a year, two, three,
until you realized
he wasn't coming back.

Home crept up on you in the middle of the night
in between a dream about the ocean
and waking up to a dog curled up by your feet.
There he was,
acting like he had never left,
like you had never abandoned him.
Like he had been there all along,
and you had just refused to see him.

Home was abandoned,
hanging out with a can of tuna and half a bag of rice
in a cupboard you forgot to empty.

Home was waiting for you outside your door
the day that you left the office
and suddenly found yourself standing in your hallway
unaware of how exactly you got there.
The day you didn't have to remember to cut across the parking lot
and turn left at the house with the lawn ornaments.
The day you didn't have to find your way.

Home was misplaced
like a set of car keys or a pair of reading glasses.
Sure, you have spares,
but no one wants to use those,
they don't have the same feel,
the right amount of wear on the leather keychain.
They don't have the right prescription,
and their frames are so last year.

Home was found in an unexpected place
on the day in October
when you had stopped looking for him,
stopped believing he existed.
When you had lost your faith
and found yourself sitting in the middle of a graveyard
while it rained.