I haven’t been home since the Plague. There’s a kind of flatness that edges outwards every time some body from where now I live chirrups “oh lovely! So lovely to go home”. Lovely indeed – home is a space where love resides. The-ly might be a qualifier – home as not quite collapsing with love but love-ly. Love like. Like home-ly. Familiar, orbiting love, brushing up against it but not always a simple synonymous.
I think a lot about home.
“Don’t you miss it?”
Idle remarks from those who’ve never left. Who’ve built themselves houses at home – perennially renovating, decorating; marking time through their small children’s birthdays.
Between here (elsewhere) and there (home) it feels as though time is flat. Space is too – stretched – so that I can only see the movements between out of the corner of my eye. Tracing my finger on a map, the map grows taut. The stretch and snap back on a flat screen.
I imagine myself snapping back – hurtling across that flatness to ‘home’.
‘Don’t you miss it?’
Indeed.
Elements. Easy familiarity and a smoothness offered by well-worn tracks and scripts. Lazy ‘…hey?’ At the end of sentences, fish and chips on Fridays, the voice of the woman who announces which train station comes next.
I am becoming familiar with voices and scripts here too – ‘go for PR’. Permanency? I’ve been implored by that before. In another southern
hemispheric island: murmurs of ‘dual citizenship’.
For a long time I resisted these suggestions – ‘ ‘ course not. I’m going to go home soon.’
But now my reluctance lies left with the cruel optimism that a love-ly home country will welcome me back, grant me a career … Rather, I perch on the in- between space of where I am, neither home nor foreign land. It’s less flat and snappable in one way or another. It’s funny, sitting on this perch – slightly distant from here (imagine to presumption of ‘making yourself at home’ somewhere you barely know!) or there (home from a distance glimpsed in glances, Insta stories, tweets, and DMs). For a year here I mispronounced the ruling party’s name wrongly. On the phone to some body from back there, they wound up a rant abt local politics with ‘… oh he did that years ago … wanted to get back in to the upper house – I s’pose that was all while you’ve been away…’.
Away – implies a return. With 14 years away I’ve been snapped back once or twice, but only to get going once again. Somewhere else.
