I remember sitting on the plane, fidgeting with my fingers, waiting for my flight to take off to Florence.
It was the first plane I have ever heard play music before take-off. I wouldn’t have expected a song I know to play, least of all would I expect it to remind me of you.
“Home is wherever I’m with you…”
You probably wouldn’t remember this, but the last time we were together before I left, this song was playing. We were sitting in the backseat of your car, parked next to the what you call the Gatsby lake. I played with your hair as we softly kissed, happy to see you smiling whenever I opened my eyes.
“Home, let me go home / Home is wherever I’m with you...”
The tense knots in my shoulders unknot with the thought of you, and I’m able to sit back more into my chair. I think about how the night before I left I snuck out of my house, and we drove around aimlessly, spontaneously deciding we should go skinny dipping. I think about how you make me feel like I’m seventeen, like I can be someone who can be adventurous, infinite. I think about how you are the first person who has ever made me feel this way - alive.
I remember smiling to myself, thinking you were my home.
What I didn’t know then was it was all an illusion, and I could never be your home as much as another girl. I didn’t know my love could never measure to your endless narcissism, that I was just a rescue-boat to whatever sinking ship of relationship you destroyed. You tried to save your ego by latching onto me -- your life jacket for when your ego needed one. All this, and I thought you cared about me.
I may never have been your home - never will be, either - but you could trick the smartest girl into believing you love her, making her believe you are her home even for just instance, thinking nothing of it, destroying her foundation with every lie, every deceiving word to make yourself feel better.
So darling, it shouldn’t be a shock to you that you’re the reason why I’m a nomad.