Field notes from the place I left
An emigrant black sheep is a liminal creature.
One month ago, I crossed the ocean to my hometown like I do every winter, and when I crossed it back again the other day I did it dragging two comically big ballchains: the guilt of leaving, the guilt of not wanting to leave after investing all I had and more in this intermittent jailbreak.
My mother gave me a stunning roadbook whose pages I can’t stop blackening with sketches and poems and delirious soliloquies.
An obnoxious way to say I started journaling again at 30, after fifteen years, because now, at least, none of the houses I let myself rest in comes with an angry man who reads my diaries just to use them against me and then pretends he didn’t—but I digress.
Am I still able to write? Am I still able to do it like I’m not doing it in front of an audience? Is it a weird thing to ask in a public post?
The impossibility of having agency, autonomy, and privacy might even be one of the many reasons I left a city that now only likes me because it can’t remember my face, because I’m the one that got away.
And I had, oh! so many other reasons to get away I won’t mention now, and I have none to go back, except the fact that the city I moved in years ago, the city I love, does not love me back either — not anymore.
I regret to say that if this is the rainbow’s end, I found nothing there. “For now?” I want, I need to add, putting all my faith in poetic justice.
Yet the physiological nostalgia doesn’t feel justified, or anything more than a psyche’s dangerous caprice, because it felt much saner to idealize a place I never set foot in than to miss the one i always wanted to escape from.
The issue about “wanting to go home” is that it’s such a pure, innate craving, but so disconnected from the reality of a home still existing or not, from knowing which place home actually is, if any.
I was looking for a place where I belonged just to find out I belong to liminality, always had, always will.
Despite myself, I belong in the in-betweens, in the temporary, in the “oh, i’m just visiting”.
In an eternally rented studio apartment, in a borrowed bedroom in someone else’s house.
In a tight seat in a cloud-piercing tin can, in an awkward conversation in a taxi cab — always different, always the same one.
I belong in the hot water of the thermal pool in the woods where I can afford to pretend to be a nymph in only once every Christmas, in my friend’s sofa where I only sit at New Year’s Eve to watch old giallo movies, I belong in those unnecessarily evocative long titles on the screen that never get properly explained in the plot.
I belong to railroads and lost highways, I belong to the crying madonnas behind the glass at random crosspaths as much as I belong to the scarlet maple leaves.
I belong to the suitcase I always keep outside on display because it’s not worth hiding it away; I belong inside it like a freakshow’s acrobat, arms bent backwards, face buried in my knees, waiting for a magician to do his number and let me out and finally let my muscles unclench.
Why would I complain about a life I chose? I did what I wanted, they say, after all, I’m so so tough and so so so free; I earned those badges but in return, i lost the illusion of having something permanent, of having someone who thinks I’m permanent.
Only childhood friends that don’t recognize me, new friends that don’t know me; the former learned how to live without me, he latter can now, because they always could.
I’m an episode, I’m an apparition, a cryptid in a blurry polaroid.
Always out of place.
Once, I left; now, I’m always leaving.
