Mom: Where are you going?
Me: Home.
Mom: But we are home.
We had just moved. The day was grey but not dim, november I believe. Late 70’s. It must have been shortly after unloading the last moving van. Not that I remember a van, I just assume there was one.
The idea that home had just been stripped of one of its most important components—the concrete that had framed it, and was now supposed to be replaced by a completely different frame, still unknown and strange—hadn’t yet sunk in. So I rode off, on my Velamos bike, back to the eight storey apartment building that had been home up until then. And there it stood, the monolith, just as it had always done—or, at least during the four years that I called it home. Only, suddenly it was shut, not accessible anymore.
On and off my bike, wandering around the building where, half of my life, I had gone to sleep at nights and woken up in the mornings, none of the friends at home, trying to make sense of it all. As far as I can remember this was the first time that I felt genuinely lost.
There was some comfort to be found in having the handlebars of my Velamos to lean on.
And she was right of course. And wrong, somehow.