(Re) coming home for Christmas, a queer account

I’ve been coming home for two years for the holidays. Before I moved, no one had ever left before me: there was always the same house to celebrate and the only family to think about. In fact, I too was one before I left. But when you move to another city you also discover many other you: by forgetting to do the washing machines and burning dinner, you get used to the domesticity of a home you have never seen before and you cultivate bonds that sprout beyond the roots of your childhood. . As love takes on a thousand different forms, you discover that you too can have different families: dads, mothers, cousins, grandmothers and grandparents without blood ties, who have not known you since you were as tall as a bedside table and yet they form, care for, guide you. everyday. You can also put nail polish on your fingers without giving an explanation.

Returning home somehow I also come back from the other person and when I see him again it is not always a pleasant meeting. I recognize him and he’s a bit on my cock because every December he looks less and less like me. I can’t wait to see my family again, and I know they feel the same: my mother would invite me to quit any job if it were to stop me from celebrating the holidays at home and my grandmother can’t wait to make me lunch “at least this time we’re sure you don’t eat it burnt “he says. So I want to see my family again to forget that it doesn’t look so much like me anymore: I listen to conversations that remain identical three hundred and fifty kilometers away after hours, days, years, and worries of an everyday life that I recognize instantly and at the same time become alien.

In contrast to the big city, the province appears smaller than before: collected in its rituals, small big events on the lips of the whole neighborhood, gossip next door, people who have known each other for a lifetime and who even if they have never spoken know who is the son of whom. My family grows and recreates itself from time to time: I have lost count of the cousins ​​who have given birth, I no longer understand which child is the son of whom, who remarried, who got divorced, who got divorced and got back together. If a baby is born the bow will be blue, if it is a baby it will be pink.

The stereotypes and antiquated practices that asphyxiated me while growing up, and which I hardly shrugged off, are still embedded and questioned with great difficulty here. At the Christmas dinner, we obsess over details that I thought I had forgotten on the street: how many portions of pasta, how much kilos you put on and how many you lost, how much weight is that girl whose name you don’t remember and how much weight has lost. other. The body – one’s own and that of others – is often a common denominator when I go home: if I say mine, it creates a discussion that never ends, and neither they nor I really want to support it. Then I remain silent and look elsewhere, I dissociate myself losing myself inside my head, again as when I was seventeen.

Every December my seventeen years resemble me less and less, but I still want to savor them, live them with awareness that I missed before. Every Christmas I come home I feel lonelier than the previous time, yet I can’t help it: I need to see it again, to hear the same conversations all over again, to hear the voice of those who raised me, to retrace the streets that never change and to meet the same faces of fifteen years ago. I need to get angry, resign myself, understand whether to speak or stop, when to save the moments and when to save myself. Because every time I come home he is also learning to observe from afar, rework, and discover that love is also unbearable and does not always agree with you.

I know that every Christmas the nail polish will require an explanation to sit at the table, but every time I put it on, it will always surprise us a little less than the previous one. I will learn to wear it, and they will learn to look at it. It will be a tradition, like so many others.

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