(The last of four installments. A continuation of The Long and Ridiculous Drive Home: Week 3) At an IHOP parking lot in Fresno, I get out of my jeep and stretch my legs; they are shaky and light after driving 2400 miles in three days. Exhausted and defeated, I am returning a month sooner than I expected and this is my last day of travel.  In a few hours, I will be back at my parents’ house in Sacramento. But first, I meet my grandparents for breakfast. I don’t tell them I am home early. Or why. They’re just happy I’m alive to eat pancakes with them. They say I’ve been “galavantin’”. That’s the word they use. Grandpa seems more impressed by the trip than grandma who is mainly focused on my red hair. It makes her heart stop, she says. I say, “Don’t worry, it’s not forever.” She explains her fear. “There’s a serial killer on the loose and he likes red heads,” grandma says, quoting the National Enquirer. “They think he’s a trucker because women with red hair are being killed all around the country.  I don’t want to think about how you maybe passed him in a truck stop or on the interstate, I don’t want to think about the danger you might have been in.” “Then I shouldn’t tell you about the trucker that waved money at me yesterday outside Las Cruces,” I said. I don’t want to encourage my grandmother’s subscriptions to tabloid news but truthfully the experience on I-10 had been a little unnerving. At first, I didn’t understand what was happening when an 18-wheeler pulled up beside me in the left lane but didn’t pass. I slowed down a little to let it by but it slowed down, too. I sped up again and it sped up, too. Was something wrong with my car? I checked my mirrors and dashboard for any lights. But I couldn’t see a problem. The truck stayed alongside me until I turned and saw a scruffy-bearded driver waving what appeared to be one of the new one hundred dollar bills at me. The face of Ben Franklin loomed large. Then I understood what was happening. I kept my eyes on the road, choosing the path of avoidance rather than flipping him the bird which in retrospect would have been more emotionally satisfying. Yet, I wondered whether this technique actually worked for him or how many women had ever pulled over for him, if any, and what did it look like when they had? Grandpa, who had been a trucker for most of his adult life, shook his head and ate his waffle, “There are some real bad ones out there, even though most of them are honest.” The fact of his life as a trucker had been a vital part of our relationship. For years, whenever we saw each other at a family gathering, he would greet me in the same way. First, he’d hug me and say “Hi, baby,” then invariably ask which route I’d taken to get there. Living in the Bay Area, my answer usually went like this: “I took 680 South to 580 East to 205 where I cut over on 120 and took 99 home.” He would nod approvingly and maybe talk a little about the routes he’d  driven for Safeway. We never talked much more than this. But somehow, it was enough. In his own way, I knew he was looking after me in the way he knew best. So at the International House of Pancakes, he asks about my travels. Grandpa shows a mechanic’s love for my jeep that it only used 2 quarts of oil, drove on through mud, ice and snow, and brought me back without a scratch. I tell both of them about waking up to the wolves howling in the Tetons. And how I’d never seen a darker night than the one I saw while driving through the countryside of Arkansas. Grandma was born in Arkansas. But she doesn’t seem interested about what I saw there. “Here’s a quilt pattern I want you to see,” she says, pulling a thin book out of her handbag, and thumbing the pages until it rests on one with stars blooming into flowers. “That’s beautiful,” I say because I love her and it’s true. Grandma is a skillful seamstress and quilter. But she hasn’t had the energy to do much of either craft for years. Yet, she always sounds so hopeful about the future. And there is obvious pleasure she finds in dreaming up the next big project, even if it never comes to be. The topic of conversation moves away from the trip. I’ve learned there is more pleasure in joining her dream than trying to get her to join mine. We talk and laugh through breakfast and when we are done we affectionately say our good-byes in the parking lot, hoping to see each other again at Thanksgiving. I drive away and rub the spot on my center dashboard where I have a hundred times before, like the spot behind a dog’s ears, to let her know we have to keep going. Twenty miles north on 99, I pass the exit to my childhood home in Madera–the house at the end of the cul-de-sac that still carries hand prints in the sidewalk and where, on Friday nights in the summer, the racetrack is audible from the bedroom windows like a dragonfly in your ear. I keep driving. My only plans upon returning to Sacramento are to lock myself in my room and hide from the world while I cry into my journal. It is also very possible that my dad will make me waffles. October was not supposed to begin this way. From running barefoot down down sand dunes on Lake Michigan, I made a planned stop in Indiana where a couple of college friends were now in their graduate degree studies at Purdue. From there, my October itinerary would take me to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky to the Great Smoky Mountains towards Florida where I would return west, eventually making my way to the Rocky Mountains. But instead, my long, uncomfortable history of unrequited love leaped up and bit me in the ass. The short version is simple. I was in love with someone. He did not love me back. But we were friends who also shared a friend. And the two of them fell in love. While in Indiana, I learned this. The details of this heartbreak are not as important as the pattern of which it was a part. I do not like to admit it but I am a habitual unrequited lover. This is my Achilles’ Heel. It doesn’t matter what a good mind or strong body I have been given in this life, what opportunities for discovery and adventure open to me, what successes I might enjoy, what spiritual epiphanies fall upon me, what feminist principles I espouse, none of those things have ever siphoned my attention and energy more than men. In third grade, I harbored a huge crush on a tall, sandy-haired boy in the fifth grade. Being too afraid to approach him myself, I asked a friend of mine if she could carry a message from me about how I felt. Upon returning from her task, she delivered his crushing reply. He said he was only into girls who were “woman enough” to tell such things to his face. Not being “woman enough” to share my heart directly was a problem that followed me for a long time. I was the kind of girl capable of saying things to myself like: If I still love him in two years, then I’ll tell him. That strategy never ended well. Because by that point, I’d become a miserably blocked river of affection. And by the time I confessed my heart to the man I loved, all of that locked up emotion broke through a dam of silence and drowned whatever friendship the two of us may have had. And I would leave hating myself and him. For example, during my last year of college, I became friends with a man who was largely considered by many to be the most physically beautiful human being on campus. We started going to the movies, sharing music, having long philosophical discussions. At first, I felt only friendly towards him. He was way out of my league, I thought. This was confirmed by a friend who encouraged me to not get my hopes up when I began to wonder whether there really was a spark of something more happening between us. She said, “He only like pretty girls.” What she meant was that he liked the kinds of girls who were pretty in a conventional way. What I heard was that he didn’t like girls like me–hulking beasts on their second round of Accutane. So when he ended up kissing one of the “pretty girls” on campus while he and I continued to be buddies, I felt loathing for both of us. I hated myself for not being prettier. I hated him for only liking “pretty girls.” Over the years, I’ve healed to the point where I can honestly say I don’t hate anything about him or me or wish to take back a single moment of our friendship. Well, except for that one moment when I poured my heart out by reading him a poem I’d written about his feet. I’d take that back. Or at least, I would give the poem to him anonymously. Like the  time I made a fake email account and sent a poem to someone declaring how amazing he was. To ensure anonymity, I even checked that the time stamp made it appear like the message was originating in another time zone. I thought my plan was brilliant until the man in question came into the college computer lab, sat down next to me, and checked his email. Bemused and curious, he began to guess out loud with a friend who he thought the sender could be. Apparently, he was confident that there were at least several possibilities. As suspicious as the timing seemed, he really didn’t show any sign of guessing that it was me. We’d barely spoken to each other. And I managed to stay utterly expressionless in front of my monitor as though I couldn’t care less what drama was unfolding just inches to my left. Crazy synchronicities like this one are how I think the Universe likes to play jokes on me.* Like the time in seminary when I allowed a friend to rent gay porn on my video account. And somehow the video got lost upon return. So I was the one who had to answer the phone call from a teenage boy asking me if I still had “Brazil Nuts 2” in my possession. And I was the one who had to go to the video store to resolve the issue in person with that same teenage employee, scanning the porn shelves as he and his buddy waited behind the counter until I found the sequel to “Brazil Nuts 1”. (In case you’re curious, I haven’t watched any more in the series. I hear “Brazil Nuts 3” was a total disappointment. Not enough nuts.) Ultimately, however, every unrequited heartbreak–and there have likely been dozens by now–has brought me to ask one question over and over in multiple ways. It doesn’t matter if a man doesn’t love me in return, can’t love me in return, isn’t able to love me for who I am, or just doesn’t know that I exist, over and over I obsess over this one question: “Why doesn’t (insert name) love me?” My journals are full of stories like these. Well, they’re not really stories. They’re more like Bruno Mars lyrics. When I left on my road trip that September, I ostensibly did so to see as much of this beautiful country as I could. But more truthfully, I was looking for home. And more than a place, I was looking for home in a person. For thousands of miles, I felt like I was rushing to meet someone though I didn’t know where he was. In searching for that home, I traveled a full month as though I was a hamster and the world was my wheel. Like Leah from Australia sitting by the phone in the hostel, I was anxiously waiting for that one phone call that would take me home. I was horrified to admit to myself that she and I had more in common than I had let on that day in the kitchen.  Because when the phone call came, I was ready to jump just as she had, to let my life pivot radically in response to whether a man fancied me or not. Instead of holding to the freedom and opportunity that still remained for me on the road, by the time I hung up the phone, nothing in me wanted to be on the road anymore. There was no point. All I wanted to do was to crawl into my bed. Even though it was 2,400 miles away. (In case you’re like my grandpa and are following my route, then you might wonder why I took the long way home. The man in question lived in Colorado and I decided to boycott the entire state out of my anger and disappointment, thus sending me on a long detour through the Southwest. You know, the normal way of handling a broken heart.) Maybe if I had decided to stay on the road, I would have learned sooner why home was eluding me with such force. Because in retrospect, I can see the ridiculous way I traveled all those miles as full of clues. I can see how the way I loved the world was a litmus test for how I loved others. Quickly enamored by beauty, I kept trying to ingest it for myself. I didn’t want to be plain. I wanted to be special. I traveled fast and demanded a lot. If I could make the world give me a beautiful memory, then maybe I would find peace. But once it gave it to me, I just wanted more. Easily caught up in the big dramas of nature I wasn’t able to see the magic unfolding in the small and slow processes that govern so much life on this earth. I wanted to come by everything as easy as a drive-thru window. I kept wondering why I wasn’t being loved in return. But I could barely open myself to saying hello to a man–to simply greet him in return. So caught up in my own story of being unlovable, I wasn’t asking how well I loved. It turned out that I had something disturbingly in common with the truck driver waving money at women on the interstate. I was spending money and burning a whole hell of a lot of gasoline to exploit a little of the beauty in the world for my own comfort and pleasure. At every beautiful vista where I found a moment of bliss, I might as well have waved money at the earth, demanded she open her legs and a couple of minutes later continued on my way where, in a short time, the aching loneliness and search for home would return. It’s taken me years to understand what a stranger in Rapids City could see in me after just a few minutes of conversation. Gul divined that a big change was coming to my life and that if need be, that I should leave all that I love and turn away from family and friends. Maybe because he was a traveler, too, he recognized a searching heart when he met one. He anticipated before I did all the ways that I first had to abandon the idea of home before I’d be ready to discover it for the first time. Fifteen years later, I am beginning to learn what I think he was trying to tell me. I still yearn for home. I still crave someone to love me. Some days, the aches and cravings bring me to tears or send me into parts of my mind that still behave like a mildly scary 13-year-old girl obsessed with a pop star. But what has changed is that I have learned enough to know that there is nothing in the world that will ease that ache for good. I cannot expect anybody or anything to love that ache away. Taking the path of marriage then divorce has burned that lesson into my heart. I have also learned that this ache is a part of the human story. While visiting hospice patients at the nursing home one day this past year, I met two different elderly women sitting in their wheelchairs at two different times of the day each calling out for help in the hallway. When I asked each of them what kind of help they needed, they each asked me to take them home. Though this isn’t an unusual request in a nursing home, it’s not something I am asked every day–much less twice in the same day. And no matter how often I am asked this question, I never feel less helpless in my response. Hearing these women call out for home pricked a sadness in me as I thought of all the ways we (myself included) long for home. In my seminary preaching class, our professor advised that if we were ever invited to preach somewhere where we didn’t know any of the struggles or challenges in the congregation, that we could always preach on homesickness. Because everyone is homesick for something. I tell each woman the only true answer I know. I tell them that if it were within my power, I would take them home. But that I don’t know if such power exists in the world now for them to go home. And that I am so terribly sorry that this is the way things are. Remarkably, both women stop yelling. And for a moment their minds seem clearer, more present. One woman tells me about her garden. The other about how lonely she is. I realize that when they are in a panic they appear less coherent and more demented than they really are. And isn’t that true for any of us when we are lost and scared? I wish I had more good news to tell the women. I wish I knew in my bones that the home they are seeking is the one they will find. But it is likely that the home they are looking for only exists now in dissolving fragments of memory. And I do not know what to tell them about the future. Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is within us. Ram Dass said we are all just walking each other home. Somewhere between those two statements I stand with these women, willing them to find a place within where they can rest their hearts and, for this brief moment that we are together, acknowledging each of us as the travelers we all are on this mysterious journey home. I once drove 9,000 miles in one month looking for home and learned very little about where that might be when all was said and done. Yet, I am grateful for such a long and ridiculous trip. I am grateful for the part of me that was able to yearn and search with such intensity that I would throw myself into a situation that scared me because my yearning for love and home happened to be greater than my fear that I would not find them. I continue to yearn for home. And that yearning continues to bring me into contact with lessons about what home is not. And this is changing my search. Paradoxically, life is teaching me that if I want to find my true home that I must first relinquish my search for love. Or, more precisely, to give up my particular habit of unrequited love. I am tired of my unrequited love stories. I don’t want to add any more stanzas to the chorus of unrequited love songs that begin with the question: “Why am I not loved by the one by the one I love?” I am much more interested now in responding to a new kind of unrequited love. If we are honest with ourselves, more unrequited love stories should begin: “The world loved me. It gave me life. But I did not love the world in return. I did not love my life in return.” Conventional wisdom tells us, like the man told Leah and me in the kitchen, that the world is home to the man and the home is world to the woman as if the home and the world are two different things. But perhaps that is where so much of our suffering begins–in separating the two. I do not know whether I will ever find a final rest for the achy places in my heart. But the distance in my mind between the world and home is closing. So I do not ache like I once did. Instead, I am beginning to be able to reciprocate a kind of love for this precious life that is opening my heart to this beautiful and hurting world. My hunch is home is thataway.       * Upon further review, I’m not sure this is the way the Universe plays jokes on me as much as it’s the way teenage jerks at the video store like to punk seminarians.