...In which our heroine finds a home.

"Home is behind, the world ahead, and there are many paths to tread. Through shadow, to the edge of night, until the stars are all alight.  Mist and shadow, cloud and shade, all shall fade... all... shall... fade." - Pippin Took, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

The notion of home is an odd one. Cincinnati is one - in the living rooms of my grandmothers, in the pulpy smelling comic shops I visited with my father, the earth of my mom's tomato plants. Chicago is another - in rooms 2602, 2714, and 813, in late night diners, in my now sparsely decorated new Lincoln Park living room. I don't think a person can have simply one home: we make it wherever we tread, hopefully, and there are many places where we can find a home.

I knew this was a new place to call home on Sunday. I went on a trip to explore the new neighborhood, and amongst the bitchin' vintage stores, eateries, and baby/dog army, I found a used book store called Bootleggers. Used book stores and I go way back, and I've struggled to find a decent one in Chicago. Now that isn't the case. I perused the dog-eared fantasy paperbacks, the film books, the vinyl in the back, the smell of paper and the elevator jazz welcoming me home.

But this isn't the important part of the story, no. For about two years, I've been trying to recover something I lost. Maybe "lost" isn't the right word - I know who has it - but it's something I can't ever get back. I never should have let him borrow it in the first place, before spring break our senior year, and it's been gone ever since: my favorite book ever, the first edition hard cover copy of Stephen King's The Stand. 

I first read the book when I was fifteen, and its narrative was so rich, so compelling, I promised myself I'd re-read it every five years.  Seeing as age twenty is half-over, I was getting discouraged. I refused to settle for a paperback or abridged edition - I wanted exactly what I used to have, the same copy.

There it was at Bootleggers, the book I'd been searching for, staring back at me from between some of King's lesser, more recent works. It was $11.03 with tax, my lucky number. It's staring at me from the coffee table, one Emily pilfered from her old apartment, like the huge tome that it is. It has a dust jacket. There's are penciled initials on the first page, "RM." The red foil men on the front are more worn than my copy, but the gold lettering on the edge isn't.

No, it isn't the same as my copy, but it's the closest thing I'll ever find. I'm thinking about how very different of a person I am at twenty than I was at fifteen - I was reading it around this time, the very beginning of summer. I'm thinking about who I gave it to, how it isn't truly lost, but even if I were to get it back, I don't want it. I'm thinking about what'll be like to start again. We need help, the poet reckoned, says the first page.

Home is in all kinds of places.

The smells of hot cocoa on winter mornings and the ants that swarm on purple peonies in the summer. The rats that scamper from my dumpster when I heave a bag in.

The late night conversations at Waffle House, or the midday ones at the new diner hangout, Golden Nugget.

On a couch in Cincinnati, Ohio, after school. In the pages of a book read by a girl who had never kissed a boy or been to Chicago. On a couch in Chicago, Illinois by a girl in her very first real apartment, who needs to tackle a pile of laundry and to ask the boys across the hall for some help on her television, although she could just as easily call the cable company.

The book begins with a page announcing "The Circle Opens," and tidies itself up nicely with "The Circle Closes," on the last page. Within the book, one of the generals mentions that lovely quote: "Things fall apart, the center does not hold" before eating a pistol. These things are certainly true, and while I live in the city now, you'll find me using the phrase home interchangeably for both here, and Cincinnati. Lots of things have fallen apart since I first read The Stand, circles have closed, forever irrecoverably damaged. But, now, in this, Oakdale Avenue, Apartment 4, that circle seems to be quite open. And still, there is Randall Flagg, threatening to give me the creeps before bedtime, though I know the creeps from the real world are much scarier. However oddly enough, I take comfort in this.

"To the one I now know most, I will tell them of your ghost like a thing that never, ever was."