I kind of remember that feeling of home. It’s always been tentative at best, a fleeting feeling of a ghost tickling my heart and getting me drunk on comfort before bidding adieu with the haughty handwave of a two dollar hooker. It passes through me, that bit of security–even when my feet are squarely planted, my mouth perpetually shouting at the same city for eight years.

Maybe it’s because a nuclear bomb of emotions and destruction hit my home so early on. Maybe because I’m chronically dissatisfied. Maybe because as the Syd Arthur song puts it, I’ve got ‘forbidden futures’ dripping through my veins that I know, with each heartbeat, are toxic to others. But, yeah, I don’t know what the fuck home is anymore.

‘Hometown Blues’ reminds me of a litany of anthems that have driven all those feelings–and me–out of the towns that I lingered in (White Arrows “Get Gone” and Electric Guest’s “The Bait’). It’s the kind of track that you enter midnight mode in your mind with, traipsing the streets of a town that you tried to settle your sorry soul in. The sidewalk, as you walk, is a fucking optical illusion. Anticipation drips off every note and the tapping of your toes and all the ways you move your feet make you believe that you can dig yourself a rut deep enough to trap yourself in.

You try to get yourself lost, to scatter your emotions in bedrooms and back alleys and bathhouses along the path, hoping enough of you will be left around that you can’t leave without reclaiming them. But when you arrive back at your house, your mental bag is already packed, your dirty laundry neatly hidden away. You’re destined to dream, and dreamers aren’t found 5 meters from their hometown. Or, so I guess you tell yourself as traces of your skeleton lay about on the beds you fly over, international bound.

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