Home thoughts

Nine years to the day since I left home to find my own. The word I've  carried most frequently close all this while is this: "Belum" -- because in a different, simpler time, I learnt that it meant "not quite yet" in a language I don't speak.

Each day is still a little discovery, and I still spend months, even years, chasing falsehoods I construct. For instance, this past year I've told more people than I care to count how I've found a home in what I do, how I learned to belong in many different cities, languages, cultures. Is a lie more honest because I believed it, thought it true while I told it? It took a professor's wish for me to realize it's reality.

"What I want for you? I want to see you belong, truly belong, in a group of people," he told me over a late lunch that we ordered off a brunch menu.

I wondered at that, how he had noticed my stranger's soul through all my words of homecoming. And wondering, I realized that perhaps some of us only truly belong as outsiders. We can never go home, because we only belong in a space that is not-home, our hearts and minds only rested when they search, constantly.

A line from Mary Oliver, a poet I've just begun to read: "They say you spend your whole life re-writing the first poem you ever loved."

This isn't the first, but it's one of the dearest:

"I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song."

(Growing Orbits, by Rilke)