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Loud footsteps felt within the chest, the walls cave in and I am trapped beneath the ruins.
Memories collide with memories, bounce wall to wall
in the claustrophobic space I call my mind
and I am desperate for an escape. The cries for a feeling of belonging flatline through my
uneasiness felt within every space.
A descendent of endlessly fleeing parents fails to model making a place feel like home and
the screams serve as an exile; I am cast outside where I am said to belong.
Childhood house mistaken for childhood home and the pummeling
bleeds into the walls and consumes me.
An exercise in class demands I place myself on a hypothetical map to demonstrate where I
feel at home and I wither. I stand on the spot where my apartment resides but that is not
where my heart is. They
tell you home is where the heart is without accounting for the diffusion of one's heart in
people now-absent. They
tell you home is where the heart is without acknowledging the beat-down, spun-around
heart that is afraid to be of use any longer.
If only you could differentiate between heart and home like you can between mother and
father.
I hang posters on my bedroom walls trying to leave pieces of me in
the site I rest at night but it is lousy. It is a lousy attempt/a lousy cause and I am not sure
whether I will ever succeed.
A word lost in translation, devoid of definition, it rings obsolete to this imagination. For I
find refuge in writing and shelter in my apartment, there is no home in which my mind feels
at ease and my body relaxes.
My home is everywhere and nowhere.
I am fresh to this Earth with limited time remaining, yet I still question whether I will be
forever detached from where I was birthed. I feel the weight of witnessing others’ belonging
in my heart and await the snap of the strings.
Staring through window after window, I begin to view myself from above as if there is not
even a home in this body.
As I am abused by life’s forces with no end in sight, I shrink into my skin in search of
warmth as a place. Warmth as a place such as present in home but I remain cold without.
The passage of time envelopes me and while I live and live and live with no grand escape, I
exclaim:
Heaven please save me and make me your home.
—Juno