What is home to you?
Home: A Zine
What is home to you?
This, I asked of my dearest friends, my community, myself: the family with whom I have created a home during the last four years.
Here, I present the many beautiful iterations of our response.
Who are you? Why did you come? Are you doing the work you came here to do?
Who walks with you?
I collect leaves off my windowsill
Wet leaves
Wet leaves, knocked off the tree outside my window.
I dry them on my desk.
I write prayers on them.
They do not burn, they do not transform and release my prayer into ash and smoke.
I am angry (I am so angry).
I crush these leaves and they smell:
the place I come from
home.
In these leaves, not on them, not in the frantic prayers that ask for a transformation that is too great.
My world, my homes do not need more fire,
Does not need to burn to return me, return to me.
(A conversation with my fish)
In you I find stillness
A joyous stillness that moves blood to the edge of my flesh
Pulsating against its barrier
In you I find
My head cradled softly and with vigor
In you there is stillness
A body of water crashing, flowing
Twirling its inhabitants
From a distance or depth
Holding life in your depth, warm and still
Precarious and proliferating, safe
I love this city perhaps more than I ever thought possible,
I love all of your iterations, and I can’t wait to know more…
A lit forearm, laughter, food of the gods. These are our memories compressed, integrated into sparkling jewels to be embedded in the limited space of our minds. A scene is turned into a mnemonic, a conversation reduced to a single phrase, a day distilled into a fleeting feeling of joy.
Time’s arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a recreation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.
I really think your friendship changed my life.
Where in this beyond are they taking me?
It is a constant act of creation, recreation, reflection, imagination
They do not all come at once, and they do not come once and for all
vous êtes des petites soleils …
They spoke loudly, with abandon, and though I wasn’t quite listening to what they said, I felt attuned to the expressions in their eyes and the movements of their lips. It was a deep sense of home in a place I’d never been—a place we were actively creating.
Fresh bread, sweet crepes frying in caramelized sugar, bitter coffee, lobsters sitting in beds of ice, garden air just after it rains
We grabbed each other’s hands and held each other close, arriving at the final steps of our journey