To My Childhood Home,
I’m writing from my first apartment’s front porch, the one I’ll be moving out of come August. I have no attachment to this apartment—unlike my home forty minutes east of Pittsburgh in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. I grew up in a small, what my friend Bella, calls a “mountain town” outside of the city. The people there love to spread the town gossip like it's nobody’s business but their own, and treat the Fourth of July as if it’s a holiday the town made up for its own over-the-top festivities.
Latrobe is not a place many call home—not even my parents. My mom is from a tiny town in Indiana, small enough to only have a five-way stop sign in the center of town and that’s it. My dad is from Uniontown, south of Pittsburgh, and by god am I glad we didn’t move there. Instead, my parents settled on Latrobe and built a new life for themselves, my brother, and me to form our own, unique lives. I’m thankful my parents moved to Latrobe because it is where I found my best friends—my two neighbors who turned into the sisters I never had—and a life for myself. I know everything I know today because of Latrobe and for that, I will forever be grateful.
However, not all stories have a happy ending.
My parents divorced in 2020, leaving our family split into four, fractured pieces. My father left in pursuit of his own happiness; he walked out one day during the pandemic and didn’t look back on the pieces he left behind. My mother fell apart. Her husband of almost twenty years had left her for the simple reason, “I’m not happy.” My brother took a vow of silence, maybe if he didn’t speak about it, it would go away.
But I chose to talk. I chose to cry. And I chose to scream.
The place I called home was going up in flames and I felt partially to blame. Was it something I did? Was it something I said? I asked my brother an assortment of questions on drives when I just needed to go somewhere to sob to Phoebe Bridgers. He gave me no replies, which made me feel crazy. How can you not feel anything? Our dad just left us and you feel NOTHING? He chose silence.
Maybe it was his form of protecting his peace? I don’t know. All I know is that the family portrait on the wall was shattered, like the glass holding it together in its frame. My life as I had known it was broken.
Telling my friends was hard because Latrobe isn’t a town where people get divorced. All I ever heard from people was their pitiful “I’m sorry”— talking began to feel tiresome and useless.
A few months into the divorce, my home started to feel like a house. A place we came into and immediately shut our doors, ignoring each other as if we were suddenly roommates and not a family. Without my dad, I felt as if the world had come to a screeching halt.
During the months without my dad in the house, I opened up some boxes of memories he had left for us to sift through and I came across a camera with our home video tapes. One tape was of the day I was born, and I pressed play, nervously waiting to see what was on the other end. The video started, showing my dad holding a baby version of me, born only hours before. What struck me most was not that my dad looked like a child, but what he said to the camera. He said, “Hi Will, I want you to know that we love you,” and I had to pause the video before I started to ball.
The twenty-nine-year-old version of my dad didn’t know he had told his seventeen-year-old son that he loved him, and I needed that. I needed him to give me reassurance during a time of uncertainty—especially during the pandemic. My house had finally felt like it was my home again, and I packed up that box to save as a memory. Now, there are many boxes in my basement: they’re sitting and waiting for someone to move them to another town far away from Latrobe. After my Mom decided to move back to Indiana in 2020, I would tell my friends, “Just a few years from now my Mom will move away!” But a few years have passed and now I’m the one that's moving.
Everything in that house is a part of me. The memory of my friends dyeing their hair in my bathroom, my bulldog coming home for the first time with us, and the many dinners at the table with family and friends. I chose to leave my home not with the anger I used to have, but with the love that filled the hallways I used to run down with my brother. I chose to leave my home with the same comfort my mother gave me when I ran into her room scared of a monster under my bed. I chose to leave my home the same way I came into it, with love.
From the wooden floorboards, to the fake granite countertops, to the hole in the wall we moved an ottoman in front of, to the doorway that I will walk through one last time. It has been a journey—it has been a life. I am so glad that I was able to call you home.
Love,
Will
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