LONGING FOR HOME

The longing grows too deep. Mine and in some way, or his own way, his.

So we fly, just him and me, home to the one garden I can miss most of all.

We arrive in the evening, just as the sun sieves in its most beautiful way among

the tall Birch trees and cast its glow on old stone walls and familiar skin,

warms customary ceramics and strawberries.

We sit and point and talk, as the light falls, about everything they've done to

the garden, about all that's grown so much, just since we were last here.

But most of all I study them. I savour the moment, tuck away as many seconds

of 'together' possible, into all the layers of me. Into the daughter, the sister,

the mother, into me. Squint at the last sun rays and the love, blinding.

He's barefoot and picking wild strawberries, as if versed, out in the herb garden.

He's mine and I'm his. He's theirs. And they are mine. They are his.

Since I moved, left, - & live in another country, all of that is heavier, 

both the missing it and its worth; that self-evident and insightful quality to a
togetherness that one only shares with people that have been there all your life.

The mother's milk and the roots. Here we are grounded. Him too, through me.

Here we fall asleep with the curtains open towards the moon, him first;

laying on his back on my belly, against a big pile of pillows.

Us two stay out in the little studio that was my home for a while.

Perhaps my salvation too. The small soldier's cottage out in my parents garden.

It's so wondrously beautiful to be here with him.

If there was anything left in me that needed to heal, we're doing it now.

The nights are warm. Our skin is damp among the thin sheets.

He dreams of robots and me of barely anything, only in frail veils.

We wake up early in the mornings, Sweden already robed in her most

beautiful summer dress. He's allowed some tea then, with lots of milk and

a little bit of honey, as we await the awakening of "MoMo & MoFa's house". 

He can't wait to make coffee with papa's little machine and we all have

to drink so many espressos it finally calls for a fist held against the forehead.

MoFa is tanned. and tattooed. that's intriguing. so is making espresso.

The longing grows too deep. Mine and in his own way, his.

They're close, him and his papa. Share a special bond of their own.

So after eight days, we prepare to fly back to England.

Home. Homesickness. Maybe some of us really have two 'Home'

and will have to live with forever missing someone.

Homesickness surely is that of longing for a person, wherever they are.

I imagine he's born with it, the homesickness.

Perhaps because it lived in me, by his side, on the inside,

before he came into this world. Because maybe the way I knew him

before we even met, maybe he knew me too. He was always there somehow.

In the mother's milk, I myself was given. In the roots.

That's what home is.

x

nafsi quote are words by nayyirah waheed