Visiting Home. The very concept seems to be an oxymoron. To have a home that you have to visit seems at least a little antithetical to the very concept of home. Nevertheless as I'm back in the Bay Area I find that I'm visiting home on many levels beyond the geographic. I find that I'm visiting myself.

One of the most intriguing concepts I encountered in George Lakoff's language class (was it three years ago already?) was that of the self-referential self. "I'm beside myself." "I talk to myself." "I take care of myself."

My... Self. The concept of self as a thing separate from, yet contained in, me. It belongs to me ("My self") it is a part of me ("Me, myself, and I"), and yet it is something that can have a metaphoric relationship both linked to and separate from my own sitting consciousness ("I'm beside myself").

I'm not the first person to extemporize on the dualistic nature of self-referencing, but when it comes up in my daily life, I can't help but share.

I'm not sure what I expected upon returning to the Bay Area. I looked forward to meeting up with friends I haven't seen in six months. I expected the stinging nostalgia of looking at a street I called my own for seven years, within a city and campus my own for eleven, undiminished by the expectation of it.

In a way, I expected to visit my self. The self I left behind.

...

Consider a refrigerator door. Notice the magnetic poetry. Half the words are unattached, floating in a sea of 'am's and 'I's with an occasional 'effusive' and 'turgid.' A portion of the rest are formed into fragments, standing on their own, or the scraps of poems sent to salvage for valuable verbs and adjectives. "sausage boy of love" and "trembling warmth in the deep places" lay about in seeming random, like the fallen pillars of unknown temples overgrown with moss, with only hints of white marble peeking through, belieing bits of their former composition.

Occasionally an entire poem remains intact:

though some were eager
in their fall
from the light
they dream
to shine
yet

The refrigerator canvas gives a snapshot of self: A clear representation of the current thoughts, desires, and meanings. Divining meaning from the not-yet-recycled fragments, the archaeologist-of-self can piece together bits of history, murkier, or at least more detached from the current self, the farther back in time.

This is the tableau I expected. Having left Berkeley at a pinnacle of social happiness and self-confidence, I sought to put my social poetry under glass for a year, put in safekeeping while I go away on a social sabbatical. My great hope was that it would be undisturbed; that I could return to find my life here preserved and waiting for me.

What I have found, so unexpected as to show me just how naive I am in life, is so much more.

As we walk through life, we continually make new friends, and old friends either continue on or drift away, like the poetry on the refrigerator. Life is a journey, and there is scenery we pass by along the way, waystations where we may linger for a time, and travelling companions we may journey with for a time, brief or eternal. The interactions form a pattern with a dimension of time; the tangled skein, the great tapestry.

My surprise on coming home was that I wasn't picking up the threads where I left them. My journey back was both temporal as well as geographic. Threads, departed traveling companions, phrases of verse long since recycled, they're all here. The refrigerator door has gained a dimension where all the poetry ever written upon it is equally accessible. I came home to find a balloonist's perspective, seeing not only my current position in the journey, but also the path I've taken to get here, all equally clear, equally accessible.

In short, I see myself. While "I" is the conscious awareness, travelling piggyback on my brain, watching, feeling, interpreting and acting in the now, my self is the repository of experience. I am the brush, and myself is the canvas. When I left this land I-the-brush could only see my immediate surroundings, my immediate past, painting my immediate future. I come back to see the work I created, the self that I am, formed over more than a decade.

I can walk down one street and feel nostalgia over the place I would eat dinner at least once a week for the year before I left; I turn the corner and wonder at the emotions latent in a cafe I haven't regulared for five years. At this moment I sit in the sixth-floor lounge of Soda Hall, a haunt of three years past, one where nobody would recognize me now, where I can walk in almost a dream state. A place more real in my memory than reality, as if I'm sitting in a holodeck typing these words. Yet there is comfort here. Comfort in knowing that it is a piece of me, pride in being in this place that helped shape me, formed in to the self and the I that I am now. Some odd sort of recursive nostalgic loop only one base-case away from mellow insanity, to be sure.

Beyond the physical environments, my relationships with people are similarly in the forefront. I'm staying with my best friend and platonic soulmate, our ten year anniversary just around the corner, and her roommate and close friend of mine of six years. I've been seeing some friends not seen in six months, others for three years. I'm experiencing passions banked like coals for two years, stirred back to a fire. I've explored regrets from six years past, readdressed and transmuted into a gentle rain that brings out grins more readily than umbrellas.

In short, I feel all of myself, carried with me. In many ways I feel my past and present as one, and I feel that I'm not so much visiting home, as crawling into myself for a time, and it just may be the happiest place on earth.