A confluence of distance and intimacy this week. My sweetheart’s birthday and our fifth anniversary, both celebrated from afar: me in St. Louis, she in New York. And today, my parents arrive from Seattle to visit this city I’ve half-called home (called half-home?) for the last two years, before I leave next month.
Meanwhile, I’m making arrangements to ship my boxes of belongings, filing a change of address, planning a going-away gathering with friends. In short, all the frenetic activities of transition and moving, which I’ve done so often in my life.
But because my time here in St. Louis has always seemed temporary to me ??? an extended sojourn away from my “real life” ??? it all feels a bit unreal. There’s not the same sense of sadness, trepidation, and thrill that I’ve felt in the past when moving from one city to another.
Instead, I feel a growing sense of satisfaction. I’m going home.
Growing up gaijin in Japan, I never understood what it meant to live in a place that felt organically, indisputably home. All my adult life, I’ve moved from city to city, following love and opportunities, never staying too long in one place.
When I moved to New York City, I was mostly miserable my first year. Then I fell in love with both my sweetheart and the city, and now ??? for the first time in my life, I have a place I can call, without hesitation, home.
Home and place is a central concern of so many of the writers I admire, and it has been a theme that I have returned to again and again in my writing.
Perhaps it is an inexhaustible topic because it can be both a source of deep yearning and a source of fear, anxiety, and frustration. And of course, for writers of color/immigrant poets/writers of diaspora, home is always loaded, layered, complex.
The three books I somewhat randomly grabbed off my shelf when thinking about this post were Facts for Visitors by Srikanth Reddy, Raw Silk by Meena Alexander, and Bright Felon by Kazim Ali.
(As I’d gathered these examples, I realized had I automatically reached for contemporary South Asian writers. This speaks, I think to both my personal leanings and also how the South Asian diaspora has created a whole body of literature about “home.”)
These books are all interested in one way or another with coming home, leaving home, finding home. And though I am returning home with a sense of joy and surety, I found myself most moved by the passages of uncertainty:
“Into the night, night fell.
She fell hard & took my face in her broken hands;
she told me I was facing home“.(from “Ninth Circle, IV. Home,” Srikanth Reddy)
Or moments where the speaker grapples with what it means to be foreign, strange, estranged from one’s chosen home:
I walked with her by the river
those months when English fled from meand the young men of Manhattan
broke cherry twigs and scribbled on my skin
till one cried out–I am the boy killed by dark water,surely you know me?
Then bolt upright you whispered:
Why stay on this island?See how it’s ringed by water and flame?
You who have never seen Granada–
tell me, what is the color of home?(from “Listening to Lorca, Color of Home,” Meena Alexander)
Ultimately, such wrestling brings us closer to our own selves. Which is, in the end, where the poetics of home always seems to lead us.
In New York I wandered the rim of Washington Square at night, sort of friendless so I had nowhere to go and no idea of a good time on a rainy evening except walking up to the Strand.
What always speaks New York to me: a sidewalk buckling and breaking under the pressure of the tree’s roots growing through concrete.
And also my loneliness, my prowling the East Village bars late at night but going home alone.
The rain and me hurrying home alone, knowing no one will be there waiting for me.
And how that loneliness and also my hunger cleansed me.
(from “New York City,” Kazim Ali)