‘The Song Continues Sweet’
She peers down: small cities, conquered in a glance
and in minutes, passed over, forgotten.
An excitement, a fear. Life in her throat,
refusing to be swallowed. The taste is so sweet.
Minutes become hours, tomorrow the world anew.
Changing trains, and a deep breath inflating sobbing lungs.
The air is cold but it’s free.
Doubtless. Onward. But alone.
She’s a life lived once. And weightless.
| Posted in » i used to paint
man with child on camel, oil on canvas, circa 2003?
A Short Dictionary of (Potentially) Misunderstood Words – Home.
HOME
It was certainly not a place for her. The only physical location that ever came close to taking on that role was the old mud brick house in Ogbomoso she lived in from age 6 to 12. With head propped against the back of her bed, she would watch the lightening dance through the sky as the storm breathed life into the billowing pale green curtain, tickling her face playfully as it flew back and forth, up and down. Yes, it was home that night. When she went back to visit 5 years later, she found it so uncomfortable to see those dusty window screens, naked and exposed, and she was forced to divert her eyes past them in embarrassment. They had cut down the climbing tree in the front yard.
House was never a home after that.
Home for her was exactly what she wasn’t. Cat’s parents were foreign missionaries with the foreign mission board. The home mission board was a different thing all together and it wasn’t their department. So because she was a foreigner at the onset, the answer to the most common question asked of her was as as obvious as it was impossible for her to give. “Where are you from? Where is home for you?”, they’d implore curiously for an answer. And, yes, there was a moment when ‘home’ was a country. “USA! We’re American!”, she’d reply then. With great excitement she took a year furlough to the home that she’d promised so many that she had. The first day of eighth grade the kids gathered around with great curiosity and pressed, “Where are you from?”
After that, she stopped answering the question.
She learned to think of home in much the same way that others think of a dream job. It became for her a romantic idea, but she believed it to be unattainable. The more romanticized her view of home became over time, the more she searched to fulfill the dream. But because of it’s perceived impossibility, she still met no great disappointment when she discovered the a locale, job or social group were still not the home she was hoping to identify with. Then she began to embrace the freedom that came with her conceptual homelessness and idealized her wanderlust to spite the home she didn’t have.
She wasn’t tied down after that.
Now only occasionally is she distracted from her blissful, weightless wandering by the eerie promise, that “…in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home, the end to all flight is unbearable.”
Now the word ‘home’ makes her uncertain about her future.
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She sat across from her friends and they asked her, “When will you return home?” Her loss for words. Her anxiety. They didn’t understand. There was no way they could.
