#10: Our first weekend… on different countries.

Nobody home. Not one of us.. we are almost three, yet nobody home.

It must be a wandering spirit within me that always gets me excited about the prospect of going places… regardless of their condition or the circumstances, I love going places. So when I took this job, after lenghty consideration between Carlee and I, I was eagerly expecting weeks like these… away from home, to travel, to work, to feed my self-esteem, and to miss what I have in order to appreciate it even more.

Sometimes I wonder if I am really bad at relationships. Sometimes I could affirm it. My history would help me confirm it. Sometimes, I think my bad choices allow me to see that the glass is twice as big as the water it holds, and the water is half of what it should be… but nothing is empty, no something is ever full.

I love Amy Grant’s music, I really do. In my conflicted and sinking faith, her lyrics, her story, her interviews, her stage banter and the feeling I have after listening to her music, have given me a beacon of hope that divinity is, or might be, after all, not reachable, but reaching out… to me.

For a few weeks in February I wanted things at work to happen in a way that my monthly schedule would look something like this: 1. several trips during February (maybe one lucky assignment would keep me from having to have a birthday party [I used to hate my birthday] and avoid explaining my decades long arguments about the self-worshipping anti-biblical modern tradition of b-days), 2. home on the weekend BEFORE my b-day (to attend my third Queensrÿche concert on Feb.16 in Dallas), 3. a heavy training schedule at corporate offices during March that would prevent me from being outside Dallas for 4. the weekend of March26-27 when I would have two chances to see my third (and fourth)Amy Grant concert, only this time with the Symphony of Dallas at the Meyerson.

I moved to the US (it's impossible for me to name the country properly: America) in May 2002. When discussing the exact date with my then prospective employer, I ended up moving my arrival date to two weeks earlier so I could catch my first concert ever with, of course, the Ames. Ever since I been living in the US, I’ve felt a desire to continue travelling along any road that would lie before me, for those years when my return trip was not back to the city where I was born, no trip ever felt like a trip back home.

And that has added to the loneliness, when instead of building relationships with the bricks that humans nearby brought to share, I built walls and threw rocks around me, because I simply could not let anyone know how homeless I’ve been.

So besides a wandering spirit, it’s been a void within me that prompts me to seek the road that would lead me to that place, where I would feel at home, at ease with myself and where I’d become owner of my surroundings in the same way those surroundigns would own me. Sixteen years ago I believed that place would be one that’d tenderly described with religious language. Now cynicism has taken over the joy. Over the last decade that place would be perfectly defined with a geographical name. But the chase hurt more than the catch would ever fulfill. For five and a half years I yearned and ached to find a home in an individual person. Just to allow pain to find a home in me. Over the last seven months a little cozy building has earned the title of a home which, at least in the material sense, is my first ever…yet now, working some 1300 miles west of that cozy little place (and farther from my homeland than I've ever been) with my wife travelling 500 miles south, across the border (in a country whose only uttered name immediately brings senseless latin rivalry to my mind), I feel more at home than I have ever been: browsing the blogged lives of a bunch who call themselves Church, listening to a Bruce Springsteen song, having read an Amy Grant related e-mail from my beautiful sister-in-law, not letting my job define myself, meeting distant friends whose lives I’ve read, working harder than ever at defining my life by who I am not what I do, terrified about the world I’m bringing my baby into, but smiling when my own dreams pass right over my head, and I see the palms of my hands with no piercings from nails, and look at my finger dressed with a ring of commitment, knowing that home is where the heart is… and my heart is here: shyly beating inside of me… and I know who loves it well.