dorothea | h.s.

hey dorothea

It felt different.

Different in how your shoes felt after a long run or the way food tasted after a cold. Familiar, but not the same.

Maybe it was me. Maybe I was the different one, and the floors of my poor childhood home had done nothing but stayed as the same dark oak in my time gone.

That was likely, seeing as it was not the shoes that were different, but the sore feet, and not the food that had changed flavor, but the tastebuds that were left unable to taste for too long to remember the familiarity of it.

It wasn't the house, but it was me.

The walls felt smaller and closer together, while the corners met with a tinge of chipped, dull, orange paint that I remembered I once dared to mark with a black permanent marker before the age of seven.

My mother's dear, old, orange walls. How dare I.

I was taught my lesson on the following Saturday morning, bright and early— a trip to the paint store followed by a few coats worth of scoldings.

The orange walls forged the background of my childhood, and every part of me wanted to rip them to shreds for the pit they were leaving in my stomach, but I knew better now.

Bittersweet was too accurate of a word— and what was I to do when the bitter overruled the sweet? It was bound to happen with the number of hellos I had to make, only knowing there was to be a goodbye coming not long after. There always was.

Enjoying the moment was what I was working on. My therapist told me to be where my feet were.

That piece of wisdom explained why my feet were here at the moment. I realized I didn't want my feet in New York or LA anymore. I didn't want them 30,000 feet in the air on a plane to god knows where every other week.

I wanted my feet in the same place I got my footing— the same place I navigated through what I so often sang about to the public and what I'd forgotten so much that it felt deceiving to say I'd experienced my own upbringing. I felt like a liar.

Acting was easy. I knew the ins and outs of stepping into the roles of make-believe people, but it was still a job of mine. The point of no return felt like a stab to the chest upon the realization that my job didn't separate from my personal life as it should have— as I always expected it to.

I was pretending to be me, but I hadn't been me for a while.

I caught a plane the second I felt the existential woe, with a plan to do what, exactly? I hadn't thought that far.

I only knew where I needed to be, but now I wasn't so sure.

"Dot, is this everything?" My dad's voice was as sweet as ever and much less staticky than over the phone.

"Yeah, that's perfect. Thank you," I grinned, my hands reaching for my bags on the hardwood floors in front of me. My hands filled quickly, and Dad rushed to take the bag off of my shoulder when I began to topple.

He laughed, "careful, Dovey." The nickname fell out with care— the one I gave myself when 'Dorothea' was far too difficult for my underdeveloped language skills to articulate. It sent a warmth through my blood that I hadn't felt in too long, with the familiarity I longed for flooding me and ensuring I was in the right place.

I was right in coming back.

A third and fourth trip up the stairs turned into a fifth to get my things back into my old bedroom, which prompted another few minutes of wall-staring and a surreal rejuvenating feeling.