I write this from a seedy hotel room in Redwood City, still clothed half in athletic warm-ups and a pink sweater I’ve been wearing for two days straight. It’s the first peace and quiet I’ve had since returning to California, and it was worth every penny of my $75 plus tax. Welcome home, they say, welcome home. It takes a tragedy to discover who your true friends are, and I’ve discovered very few since my return. It’s not mere displacement anymore, it’s alienation, it’s the sense that someone hasn’t just been warming your seat while you’re away, they’ve taken it, and they’ve been hoping you wouldn’t come back for it. Now it’s just a crude struggle I don’t have the energy or inclination for, the type of hair pulling, knock down, drag out fight like the kind that occurs between the last two people in a game of musical chairs. I just want to walk away and give my chair up. I never wanted to come back for it anyway.

The receptionist looked startled tonight as I dragged paper bags and suitcases down the carpeted stairs into the hotel lobby, crashing into glass doors and stumbling over my own heeled shoes. “Will you be ok,” she asked with concern. “Your room is on the second floor.” If I can survive the estrangement of my family from my life and conscience, I think I can get up one flight of stairs to the second floor. Or maybe I can’t. There is that old saying, the straw that broke the camel’s back. And when that right turn signal in my dear old Camry started blinking insanely, I pulled out my 1998 owner’s manual. The turn signal arrow will flash more rapidly than normal when a front or rear turn signal is out. Well then, I thought, as I shoved the manual back into the glove box. Well then. I cried down the highway, going 80 mph in a blur of horror and anguish.

It’s $8 for a small crappy Round Table pizza out here. Gas is $1.71 for 87 octane. I haven’t eaten Round Table pizza in years. It’s still bad. I miss Mineo’s, snow, and Superstar. I bought a quart of milk at the Albertsons, still insanely thirsty after hockey. I am proof now that while unemployed and homeless, hockey goes on. With nowhere to go and my car packed with most of my worldly belongings, I drove to the rink at 4:00 and stared at the whiteboard with the locker room assignments. Someone was pounding on the plexiglass behind me. I turned around and it was the assistant coach for my women’s team, on the ice. “I got you in two games tonight, because most of the girls went to the Sharks game,” he yelled through the crack between the zamboni doors. I nodded in acknowledgment, then went outside to get my bag. They made me play D in my second game, and I haven’t been so confused since high school physics. I had the puck a lot more, but fatigue and the steady stream of tears that fogged up my face shield made it difficult to skate. Violently off sides at one point, I wanted to go home. Remembering I had no home, I stayed and skated it out alongside a group of women who remained supportive despite seeing that I couldn’t skate backwards or stay in position.

As a child in middle school, I often dreamed while outside, forced to play softball and other sports I disliked, that a great bird would swoop down from the sky and take me far away from this place I hated. I think at various times in my life, that bird did take me places, but only for such short duration that I was never able to grasp the magnitude of what I was missing, of the places I visited but never lived, of the people I would never meet, of the great loves I would never have. So more recently, I guess this bird decided to give me that chance, to let me develop a life far away and to love and to lose and to be inconsolable, before cruelly returning me to this place that I know now I don’t belong. All I can think is, that bird must be an albatross. He’s definitely not a blue bird of happiness.

I wish I could stay in this dumpy hotel for a long time. But you know, the internet access is bad. So tomorrow I leave, but only after stuffing my pockets with the free continental breakfast, because that is what homeless people do.