My Queer History: “Come on Home”

We had four months to prepare.

You survived the roadside bomb that exploded under the cab of your truck. The medics looked at your ear and bandaged the cuts on your arms and face from the windshield glass. The Army gave you back your weapon and the responsibility of security on the Port of Mogadishu. You continued to call me every day. In October, I made you a victory garden, full of pansies that would bloom in our college colors when you came home. In December, I adopted two toy poodles, because you’d always wanted a dog.

You couldn’t prepare. I didn’t prepare. I didn’t read books. I didn’t get support from the Army. I didn’t talk to anyone about how you’d come home, what kind of shape you’d be in.

I knew I’d be stacking sandbags against the river of your trouble.* I’d monitored your voice over the satellite signals, heard your keyed up optimism, the positive lilt of your sentences. You weren’t protecting me; you were protecting yourself.

When you came home four months later, you weren’t home. There was the knife under your car seat, the nightmares, the silences punctuating our conversations, the distance, the tears, the anger, the chairs moved against walls. You were climbing back from something I couldn’t understand, so I didn’t try. All I could do was name what I could see.

Years later, a doctor vacuumed a piece of shrapnel from your right ear. You could hear it clank down the tube, and you wondered how it got there, forgetting the blast, because erasure is survival. And when you drove home from that appointment, your windows down in the spring air, the noise of a passing semi made you lose your breath. Hearing again magnified danger.

You were no longer hitched* to the Army, but its ghost followed you. You made a living working on Army bases, speaking the language of generals. When the Army called to ask you to come back, you told them that they didn’t want you. The recruiter fell silent when you told him why, and that felt like a victory.

You are no longer in danger, but your body doesn’t know that, taking over your mind in all sorts of places: at fireworks shows; in the middle of the night; on a hot day in Belize with our daughter when the chain came off your bike stranding you both on the side of a dirt road lined with abandoned buildings; when you saw an oil truck flip over and burst into flames, and without thinking, you pulled over to help. When your limbic system takes control, when fear floods the blood in your veins, you forget where you are. It is my job to remember why, to sit still as you face invisible enemies,* to break the spell. “You are safe,” I tell you.

Your ear still aches with the memory of trauma and constantly rings with tinnitus, which may never go away. I don’t try to imagine. I know my work. “Come on home,”* I tell you with different words. Come on home.

*Lyrics from Indigo Girls’ “Come on Home,” All that We Let In, 2004, by Emily Saliers

This essay is part of a series that explores my personal history of queerness through the songs of the Indigo Girls, Amy Ray and Emily Sailers. For details on the project and links to all of the essays, check out this introduction: “My Queer History: Me and the Indigo Girls.”