“I don’t live here anymore.”

That’s what I said to my sister when she asked me to answer the telephone during my visit “home” last weekend. I almost made my mom cry.

I hate going home.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my family. But going home is like crawling back into a box from which I’ve just escaped — no light, no fresh air, no room to breathe or to stretch.

I don’t live there anymore. I don’t get phone calls on the landline. There’s not any food in the refrigerator that I like. I sleep in the guest room. My sister lives in my bedroom, and my brother parks in my garage space. They’ve rearranged the furniture and bought a new television.

Sure, I keep my off-season wardrobe in a closet and my childhood memories shoved in the attic; it isn’t the material things that matter anyway.

What does is that my brother and sister don’t need me anymore. My parents treat me like a guest in my “home.” I’m welcomed as a visitor at my church and at my high school. I haven’t been gone that long.

I’m only 20 years old. I’ve gotten a gleaming glimpse of growing up. Sometimes my friends and I reminisce about elementary school “so long ago.” It was more like yesterday.

I left “home” years ago, not just the two since I’ve been at college. I left when I was nine-years-old and I realized there was more to life than long division and spelling tests. I was studying for the geography bee, and that’s when it hit me. “Hey, there are other countries in the world that don’t speak English.” It hit me when I was 16 and my first boyfriend told me he cheated on me. “Hey, love isn’t easy like in the movies.” It hit me when I lost some childhood friends over a high school spat, just weeks before graduation. “Hey, even if you know someone, you might not really know them.”

It kills my mom when I say “I don’t live here anymore.” And I learned this weekend that it’s one more thing I’ll keep to myself when I go “home.”

My parents are good people. But they are not open-minded. I hate going home because they expect me to be what I was, not what I’ve become, not the changes.

And Lord, have I changed. I want to consider a religion other than Christianity. I want to share my new political views with them. I want to tell them I have gay friends. I want them to meet my boyfriend, and I want to ask my mom questions about sex. I want to tell my siblings what real life is like and how just saying “no” isn’t how it works.

As I drive past the cornfields a few miles from the house, I start to get that cozy warm feeling. I’m escaping from work and school for a few days. It’s a safe feeling. And then it’s gone. The coziness is replaced with emptiness, a reminder of what was missing in my life before, when “home” was the only place I knew. But instead of subsiding after a few minutes, maybe hours, the feeling stays until I leave again. I don’t hear the country music and the pick-ups rumbling by that I want to remember. Instead, I hear racial slurs, sexist comments and expressions of homophobia. And it burns in that emptiness. Instead of giving me that warm cozy feeling, going home scorches my heart.

I wonder why my family doesn’t see it too.

Some would say, love will be enough; it won’t matter how I’ve changed. Goodness, it’s the 21st century already.

But what if they don’t accept me? Even if they do, they might say, “Oh, it’s a phase.” They might “accept” me, sure — but not the new way of thinking I own, not the real me. And that’s what matters. I just want them to listen, to really listen and to think about it. I just want them to try to understand. I could live with that.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. It hit me when my mom asked what I did last weekend and I couldn’t tell her because, “Hey, my mom still thinks I’m 12 years old.”

I should be grateful that I have a family that loves me and cares about me. But what’s it matter if I can’t be who I really am?

I hate going home.