Coming Home

Coming home always has multiple meanings
From awkward hugs that remind me
Of too much time passing by.
To the smell of old age wrapping home--
A constant reminder of goodbyes.
Goodbyes that can and will be permanent.
But the heart won't learn to accept.

Coming home to boxes full of sweets
And eyes withering with decades gone by.
Eyes that look at me, with so much love.
It would fill an ocean.
Sadness permeates the books lined so haphazardly
In every nook and cranny of the house.

Too much knowledge and too much love destroy equally.

Coming home to my two fathers
Whose love is more than that of a large, joint family.
Whose care and scoldings mean so much more today
Than all the years when teenage ruled and rebelled.
Conversations that blend mathematics with governance,
Geography with historical tales and books--
The books in this house are family trees of voluminous emotion.

Coming home to hands that shake as they feed me.
So much pride in home-grown mustard greens-- 
Growing accidentally, like the distances between us now.
Expansion-- of silences, of origami boxes and withering pages
Resonate consistently, saying, "come home for good".
I am a little stranger to it all each passing year
Growing fonder of and more distant from their balding, greying heads.

Coming home each year-- a little older.
Growing within myself, growing smaller from them.
My two fathers occasionally chuckle from memories
Of my infanthood and their youth.
Those chuckles turn to sudden sighs of the present
Like dying batteries of a constantly ticking watch.
And we all return to the normalcy of today.