Et tu? / The Definition of Home

 What do you call home when the place you grew up in forfeits that distinction? Home is then a transient entity, finding its place in men who promise futures of growing old together while sitting at home with their wives and children, of loving and being loved in return as they make families of their own while you distance yourself from yours. 

Is it too much to ask for: to be held and weep freely without reproach or judgement. Is it too much to ask for, for someone who does not make me fear the alternate universe where they will turn their backs on me, stab me in the sternum with pitying eyes, asking 

“Why didn’t you see this coming? Your own blood turned on you, how could you expect any more from a stranger?” 

I answer, 

‘because at least I expect it from you.’

I foresee the bloodshed and betrayal and walk towards it anyway, because at least I have a chance to change it. I can never change something that was meant to happen, something born of me being the way I am and my family being who they are.

We are the fucking products of our times, destined to clash so that destiny could fuck off and revel in the annihilation that follows. I am expected to forget the hurtful words they said, to not keep a knife behind my back at all times in case ties need severing. Scission, so clean and sterile, as if the aftermath of such violence could be anything but chaos. 

How am I to deal with the contradiction of wanting to go back home if I never left the house that raised me? Is it always about the dirt or blood we come from rather than the space which does not threaten to collapse and expose our naked being to the world, the constant danger of being found out in vulnerability. 

I had to train my parents to knock, ask, and enter, and still the doors and walls of the guest room are but mere sheets of paper stitched together with sand. Guest room, because I have not yet grown out of living out of suitcases and feeling temporary. A transition. 

I am still afraid. Afraid of not meeting with the men who promise me futures of warmth and the freedom to cry, afraid of moving out of the house because no matter the transgressions of its occupants, its bones of cement and wild gardens are familiar in their sadness. Their decay. The rot inside me calls out to nature’s morticians: the ants and cockroaches and the fungus that deteriorates my bedroom doors. I am all that is left of a body composed of deadlines, and sickness, and heartbreak, and a mind that is too tired to want anything more than love. 

Love - the word seems too fickle to encompass everything I want, I need. I don’t know the distinction anymore. 

As if my desire could be sequestered in necessities and luxuries, as if love - what is up with this word - could be anything but a permanent knife in the blade holder of my being and I don’t know what would hurt more: the blade leaving or staying. 

I am so tired of it all. The loneliness I bind myself with, the future of a career I no longer have the fuel to imagine beyond what is required. Necessity has become a rule of thumb with each browse of the shelves in the supermarket, having to choose between the regular milk or the vanilla-flavoured almond one. Driven in with each exchange of not getting something now to get something later. False promises I would make to myself, knowing I lied. 

Knowing the truth.