Home

I come from rich fertile lands threaded through with ribbons of blue-green water. I come from where crows mourn their dead under Poinciana trees and badgers scamper through wild sugarcane, tiny pawprints left like memories in the dirt. Or as my mother calls the long grass in her native tongue - kashful. I come from concrete jungles that never go silent and I come from a penitentiary made up of people and their judgements.

I don’t really know where I come from. I don’t know where I belong.

My hand wrapped tightly around the door handle, I stare at my home of 12 years, eyes trailing over the familiar silhouettes of the couch my grandma spends her evenings on, watching tv, the family portraits hung up on the wall, the book shelf stuffed to the brim with poetry books at the end of the hall, a glimpse of my grandpa’s study, its door slightly ajar. I think I've forgotten how to breathe. Or perhaps I'm holding my breath for something. Anything. Nothing.

I try to commit every single detail to memory, eyes darting around, starving and attempting to devour every single hue and shade and line and curve and cement them all in the folds of my mind. I feel lost. Unanchored. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Two months? Three? A year? Half a decade? Never? I mutter prayers under my breath to whatever god will listen, begging, pleading to be allowed to keep the details safe in my head. That time would be kind and let me remember everything as if I had never left. I don’t want to go. I don’t want to stay. I don’t know where I belong. But the plane ticket is on the dining table and like Robert Frost put it - “Nothing gold can stay.”

I can’t feel my own face when I pull the front door shut, standing there on my doorstep. The doorstep. I’m homesick and I haven’t even left yet.

I come from a cacophony of laughter at dinner. I come from bickering friends sitting on staircases. I come from nights spent on dewey grass outside my father’s childhood home, staring at the night sky ravaged by light pollution. I come from rainy days spent sitting on the roof, in awe of the petrichor hanging in the air. I come from home.

Hiraeth. The longing for a home that never existed. Except for me that’s not true. I miss things that exist as concepts.  I don’t miss my house. I don’t miss my room. I miss the miasmatic blanket of nostalgia resting on everything. Home isn’t the blue building on road number two. They forgot to tell us home could be everything. What you know, what you feel, what you hear, what you see. Home is my best friend's smile and the smell of my mom’s cooking on the weekends and the song my brother plays on repeat on cloudy days and the school library and my sister’s arms and the frown of my aunt as she watches me trip on a flat surface and try to act like nothing happened. Home is anything that feels like it. And I'm starting to think like Alice in wonderland, I might have grown too big to fit here.

I was 7, wanting to grow up as fast as possible, in awe of the adult world. But here I am, at the edge of 17. And I want nothing more than to find the remote control and hit freeze-frame on life. Not rewind, not forward. Freeze. I want to live in this moment for the rest of eternity. Because in this moment, I'm still home.