#235 - Vagabond
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Home? Home was an illusion.
I have had too many homes.
Home was an elegant townhouse where my wife Renée hosted soirées and served cream cakes to the ladies of the capital. Perhaps she hoped to eventually become the social queen of Barrayar - and why not? Many a Lady Vorkosigan had done so before her.
I was happy there, but the happiness was an illusion. And to be honest, though I loved her deeply, sometimes leaving to return to the ship (or the barracks, or the provinces, or wherever military duty sent me) was a pleasure. The femininity of the decor, the frivolousness of the concerns - these wearied my spirit after a while. I never had time to actually talk to her: she had too many social engagements, I had too heavy a schedule. She did not understand my desire to spend time in solitude, drawing, desperately trying to find a purity of light and shadow and form that would capture the elusive magic of reality - she thought art was for artisans.
Looking at my work... she had a point.
So home was wherever I was stationed. I'd lived in tents and palaces, caves and hotels, the attic rooms of my parents' elegant estate, and bomb shelters on the front - if a messy civil war can be said to have a front. Home was wherever I happened to be sleeping: sterile cabins or the houses of casual lovers.
Ges Vorrutyer's bunk: once, it was the place I'd left my heart, for safekeeping, to return to it as often as I could. The huge oversided monster of a marital bed I shared with his sister - I kept my heart there, too, for a while.
Then my father's home, bachelor residence full of servants and soldiers, some as familiar as family from my childhood: however I aged, they saw me as Young Aral, who stole apples from the pantry and climbed the trees and sailed paper boats. Now that my wife is dead, I believe they call me Poor Master Aral, and as my father ages, there is a sadness about the place. Too much death. Too much war.
Home is the Emperor's residence, its combination of shabby Baroque and ugly militarism, where I often sleep on a cot at his door, like a faithful guard dog. He represents my planet an dits history and its hope for the future. That is where my heart is now, so that is now my home.
Home is not a place, but an ideology.
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Character: Aral Vorkosigan
Fandom: Vorkosigan novels by Lois McMaster Bujold
Words: 424
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