TITLE: Feels Like Home
AUTHOR: Alicia Edwards
FEEDBACK: [email protected]
SUMMARY: When you’re homesick, you need something that feels like home.
FEELS LIKE HOME
You’d asked him, once, why he slept with stuffed animals. He’d told you then that they felt like home. You’d assumed that meant he slept with stuffed animals at home, and, therefore, having them here, on the bus or in the hotels or wherever, was like bringing a little piece of home along. Which was what he’d meant, sort of. But not entirely.
It
was probably a year later, when you were feeling particularly homesick, that he
explained it to you. He was kind of
surprised, actually, that you didn’t have something like that. He’d gotten that one stuffed bear when his
sister was born. You knew that; you’d
known it almost as long as you’d known him.
She’d gotten the bunny, he’d gotten the bear, and he’d named her bunny
Patty for her, and his bear Buster, after characters in some cartoon he’d loved. He was the only one you’d come across so far
that could even recall that particular cartoon. “Mapletown,” you think it was called.
He
found you on your bunk, curled up and hugging your pillow and trying so hard
not to cry that you thought you might stop breathing. You were embarrassed he found you like that, because none of the
other guys seemed to get homesick anymore.
You all had in the beginning, especially during those first few months
in Germany, but now you were all adults.
“Don’t
you have anything that feels like home?” he asked, sitting on the edge of your
bunk. You looked helplessly around you,
at the pictures you’d taped to the walls at the start of the tour. Somehow, they seemed to make things worse
this time.
“Not
that looks like home,” he said, eyeing one of your whole family sitting
on the porch steps of your house back home, “something that feels like
home.” He disappeared from your bunk,
the mattress bouncing up a little from the absence of his weight, and you
thought again about how, sometimes, it was just so hard to follow his train of
thought. He returned a moment later,
though, holding that bear. Buster.
He
started to tell you the whole story, again, about the reason Buster’s head
flopped forward against his round little belly (the bear had been almost as big
as him when he’d gotten it, and he’d had to carry it around with one arm around
Buster’s neck, almost in a head lock, squishing all the neck-stuffing up into
Buster’s head or down into his belly) and the time he’d left Buster in a booth
at a Baker’s Square in Pennsylvania, on their way home from a family vacation,
and he couldn’t sleep for three nights until the restaurant had kindly mailed
Buster back.
You
nodded, wondering where this all was going.
You were appreciative of the company, but really just kind of wanted to
wallow in your own homesickness, curtains drawn to shut out the world flying by
outside the bus. There he was, though,
pushing Buster towards you. “Smell
him,” he said.
You
looked up, all wide-eyed and slightly confused. But you took the bear, pressed your face into the top of his
well-worn head, and breathed in.
“I
don’t know if it will work for you,” he said, “but that’s what I do when I’m
homesick. That’s why I have him. He feels like home.”
You
lowered the bear from your face, but hugged him tightly in place of the
pillow. Buster had been molded into the
perfect hugging shape from years of… well, being hugged, you guessed.
“See,
I’ve had him for so long,” he said, “that so many different smells are in him,
now. He smells comfortable.”
You
had to agree. Even though those smells
weren’t of your house, weren’t necessarily familiar to you, they did smell
comfortable. There was something about
a well-loved stuffed animal that had been places, that had collected such a
variety of scents, that just smelled loved. Comfortable. Like home.
You
hugged his stuffed animal, probably one of his most-valued possessions, and you
felt the homesickness dissolve and dissipate.
And right there, at that moment, maybe for the first time, you really
understood him.
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