thinking of home

Where I grew up, relationships are intense, overwhelming. We are enmeshed in a thousand bonds of love, obligation, gratitude, deference, duty, thrown like a smothering net over our existence. The air within the walls of home is thick. Thick, and, often, foul. Love is vitiated with recriminations and reproaches. The debts of gratitude are too overwhelming to ever offer the possibility of repayment in equal measure. Someone ends up feeling cheated, of having given more than one got back.