"out" -- creative nonfiction

It’s sometime in the spring I turned eighteen, and I’ve been out all night.

When you’re young, the last place you want to be is home—home is where your mother asks you where you’ve been and your sister is always stealing your hair products and your father insists that Star Trek is the family’s show of choice, regardless of its unpopular standing in a house full of women. Home represents people that you have to answer to, and an accountability that you will appreciate and long for when you’re older. An accountability that being out does not entail. When you’re young, and you’re out, your only responsibilities are meeting friends at a bar in the city, wanting to kiss a boy that you like outside in the dark while your friends erupt from the double doors, laughing, telling you to break it up. Then driving back into town to hang out in a neighbourhood pub, playing a game of pool for a dollar, eating greasy breakfasts at three a.m. and driving eight people home in your car while the sun comes up over the suburbs.

Dawn in Sherwood Park in the springtime is light grey, cold. It is five a.m. and I’m turning my key in the lock that always sticks, jiggling the doorknob, making a racket. When I enter the house, it is a quiet Friday morning. It won’t be long before the rest of the household begins to stir. My parents will wake up, first my father who will shower blind without his glasses on in the bathroom next to my bedroom, then my mother who will make coffee, eat breakfast and put on her makeup. Then the sister that remains at home will come upstairs, use my hairbands and bobbypins to hold back her thick black hair, use my hairspray to set it all in place. Borrow my necklace and pair of my shoes, all while I’m still in the first hours of my night’s sleep—my lopsided schedule works well for her “borrowing” habits.
Once in my bedroom, I change into pyjamas and get into bed without washing my face. My mascara will leave little black smudge marks on my pillows and I have to sleep with my hair back in a ponytail because of the smell of cigarettes it has accumulated at the pub, but I’m young and I think that I’ll have this amazing complexion forever, so I close my eyes against the grey light that comes in through the window. As my mind slides towards sleep, I listen to birds singing outside and the first chirping alerts of my father’s alarm clock down the hall.

Home: a bungalow on Meadowbrook Road, a long driveway that I had to shovel the winter my father broke his leg slipping on a patch of ice while out for a smoke, a fort out behind the garage that my sister built with a hammer and nails and stolen plywood, my messy bedroom with yellow walls, green living room couches, one shower, a red kettle, and most importantly, the family that lived inside of it. Five women. My father, my mother, and their four daughters. We all lived there together, once, before marriages and babies, school and careers.
The room that was once the nursery, with its baby-bunny wallpaper and thick orange curtains is now a charming office. The room that belonged to my teenaged self, its yellow walls scarred by tape from posters I once adorned them with, is now a guest room with flowing white curtains that fall to the floor and a duvet to match. Five women no longer vie for the use of the house’s single shower—one could probably shower whenever they pleased, now. When everyone lived there, it was not uncommon to find someone sleeping in the hallway in the earliest hours of the morning, staking out the bathroom door, ready to wake up and jump inside the moment anyone in the house stirred. Of course, my sisters had their permed eighties hair-dos to worry about; these shower stakeouts were necessary steps taken towards maintaining their public images.
The bedroom where I fall asleep in the early morning to the sounds of birds chirping and water running in the adjacent bathroom: this is what I think of when I think of home. I painted the walls yellow with the help of my mother and eldest sister, Sherry. Sherry painted green ivy along the ceiling with a stencil to match the ivy-patterned curtains my mother had sewn for me. We tore down flowered wallpaper, painted yellow over blue, replaced the stained brown carpet, made the bedroom mine instead of that of the sister that lived in it before me.
The screen is torn from when I used to crawl in through the window after stacking up all of the patio chairs and using the gas meter on the side of the house as a foothold. If asked why the screen had never been fixed, my mother would probably roll her eyes and mention the fact that all of the basement windows are now single-paned—evidence of the sneakings-out of my two eldest sisters. Or she’d tell you about the time that Melanie, her second child, had thrown a wooden kitchen chair out of her bedroom window, thinking that it would land upright and that she could use it to climb down. The chair broke, she got caught, and for the next several years she would sit on that very chair at the desk in her bedroom, studying to become an engineer. The leg of the chair was repaired with several layers of packing tape. She graduated and became quite successful.
Home, where my mother reads books, crochets blankets for her grandchildren, makes tea, works on cross-stitch projects, continually loses her glasses in the couch (she must have twenty pairs, half of which are broken from being sat on). Home, where my father eats dinner, drinks a diet pepsi (sometimes two), smokes cigarettes on the front porch (one after work, one after dinner, one before bed), reads the newspaper (section by section, throwing them on the floor when he’s done) and watches TV (if not a sci-fi show, then it’s Law & Order or CSI or other such crime dramas) on the same schedule every day. Home, where my sisters and I have told each other secrets, said spiteful things in moments of anger, laughed until we cried at jokes that only we would find funny, created memories that contribute so wholly to my sense of self, belonging and heritage.

Coming home at five a.m., I am still in that in-between stage in my life. I am still free to stay out all night on a Thursday and to sleep all day on a Friday. I have a mistaken sense of responsibility, it seems. Being home represents a responsibility that I’d rather shirk by committing all of the usual teenaged acts of revelry. I am only hazily aware of the water running in the bathroom next door and the birds chirping outside of my window with its torn screen as I slip towards sleep, but I am not at all aware of the way I will later feel about home. About the escape from responsibility that I will find in it once I’ve grown up beyond the novelty of being out.