Home Is Getting Smaller

A diary entry from a trip back to my hometown

Two major corners of my map have now been cut off. We never turn right at the roundabout anymore, at the bottom end of Stockton right as you drive into it, past the big fields on the back road then cutting into the estate - I’m straining to remember the route but I know my body would drive it without a thought. I hold myself back from asking the question in the car as I sit in the back and wonder what grandma’s house looks like now, how they might have decorated it after ripping up the ever-plush carpet and pulling down the textured wallpaper pushing flowers into the room. I don’t know who lives there and they don’t know I spent three days a week every summer holiday learning to bake pies in the kitchen and typing on the typewriter that now lives in my bedroom. Her bench isn’t hers and I don’t get to go there and sit on it anymore. I don’t get to sit at the round dining room table and pull a jelly orange out of white icing on top of a fairy cake. We don’t go to that part of town at all and we never will again.

Yarm is being cut up too. Mum said it casually, “we’ve put the bungalow up for sale” and I’ve been casually sad about it since. Selling furniture, donating clothes, binning documents gathered over years of new technology manuals and month calendars. If I had my way everything would be saved. Sentimental to my detriment, I would be a hoarder. The top shelf in my wardrobe is set to collapse with 25 years of stuff, stuff that meant something, gathering till the wood bowed. I’m too scared to sort through it and I’m too soft to stop so I’m collecting until the shelf cracks. I wish I had space for every bit of grandad, I’d volunteer up my cupboard space if it meant I wouldn’t have to hear about another shirt given away. I’ve already had the second of thought that maybe I should live there. Maybe I should box up my current life and trade it in for theirs, find a husband, have a baby and bring her home to the spare room just so I don’t have to see it go and lose that pathway, down to the top of yarm and then a sharp turn left. First right and four streets down. I don’t want to stop going there when I’m home. But I don’t want to make a home of this town again. What is there to do.

I don’t let myself imagine how my parents feel. I was one when we moved here. There have been 24 years of evening walks to pop round to Nana’s. I’ve noticed the last few times I’ve been home, Mum still likes to walk that way – over the stone bridge, down the main street but now back over the blue bridge. The route is smaller because they’re not there anymore, there’s no need to walk onto the estate.

One day this house won’t be either. One day, when I’m old, the window won’t be mine and my dad won’t yell at me for leaving it open anymore. My bedroom has been left like a relic of me. In the months I’m away, a hair band will sit in the same spot on my windowsill waiting for me. The books on the shelf are slowly getting bleached by the sun, notes on my pinboard are fading with time as it ticks with the shadows like a clock casting around the room, never changing because my mum wouldn’t dare. Sometimes the kitchen will get a new photo on the wall but that’s normally about it. When im here, time holds still a second it feels like. I step back into a very specific self – not one I really love, but one that exists; all tantrums and tears and curling up on the sofa at 8pm. She’s a baby animal, angry and soft. She doesn’t function well. I said I was back here to try and get back into good routines, wake up earlier and go outside more, but I’m doing the opposite. Dad gets annoyed, mum worries. But the cocoon of it is so warm and cosy, I don’t know how to move any faster in the sludge of childhood, reluctant adulthood and thick treacle nostalgia for the bits in between.

And there is nowhere to go. The world of home is shrinking and I’ve forgotten how to drive my mum’s car to the seaside like I used to as a teenager. There are no houses to walk to, no pies to make. On the train platform, I keep fulfilling the one wish I had when I lived here; to leave. But each time there is less left behind, and one day there won’t be this point from which I measure how far I ran.