The basic thread of Emma and the Fairy Queen is far from original. A person ends up in a different place by accident/fate/luck, and gets back home again. It’s simple and familiar. There are two specific complaints I’ve heard with this structure, and they are as follows: “If I found my way into fairy land, I wouldn’t be rushing home” and “How is the main character supposed to have a normal life again after all of these strange adventures?” The second is the one I wish to tackle.
I’m not too worried about Emma. She’ll figure things out. But it brings to mind a phrase that’s been rolling around in my head for awhile: There’s no going home.
I’m pulling it from the song “Exile” sung by Kate Rusby and Kathryn Roberts. I don’t know if the song is original to them or not, and I haven’t spent enough time pouring over the lyrics to know whether they mean it the way I mean it when it’s looping through my head, but it’s a beautiful song.
The way I mean it is the way that people mean it when they suggest that characters like Emma will have a hard time finding their way again in the real world. It’s not that you cannot, physically go home. You can do that. That part is easy. It’s that you don’t fit anymore, and you’re not sure where home, in the less literal sense, is. The house is still here. It might not be home any more.
I didn’t go to fairyland, though there were days my freshman year that it felt like I had. I went away for college. A simple, mundane thing. And I’m not sure where home is anymore.
This May I’ll graduate. If I am lucky and well prepared and determined, I will pack up the following fall and start grad school. I’ll live in an apartment instead of a dorm, and I will take further steps toward my independence and away from the home I grew up in. These are happy things, but there is still a sense of loss, and a sense of being unable to fit back in and pick up my life where I left it when I went away. Some days I desperately want my home back, and other days when I can hardly stand to be here. I am stuck in the present, torn between the past and the future.
There’s no going home.