Who Will Be Home To Me? (Ode to Admission to Graduate School)

5-minute read
I don’t feel like writing. I don’t want to hear my thoughts. Writing is an alternative form of self-communication and sometimes it feels freer than inner and outer monologues.


I already know this space is not mine anymore, that it is time to move forward, leave the person I am yesterday. I am still holding on to them. I am afraid to go farther away from the ideologies and traditions I grew up with because they are here in this soil and the air and the blood of us.


Far away I get to forget that tradition and belief are tangible. But here where they are my mother and grandmother and aunts and stare at me angry and speak of me strangely the strange who could not be the girl who left and asked for permission but broke the decision handed down…


They said, Do not go. They said, Remember the taste of hate for white skin which sinned us and un-kinned us from the wind and sea and sky and earth so that we have had to live centuries unbirthed. We are living unbirthed. Remember this! White is evil, regardless of its location.


Remember this! We are family by blood but more so by skin. Remember this. There will never be another us to fill your vein. We are kin un-kinned but we are in your skin and leaving us does nothing but leave you in two places at once without acceptance in either because when you leave us for massas elsewhere you are leaving you too and and left you is more you than the you who left your land of the navel-string of your ancestors.


I am afraid of leaving home in the fear that my body will have no place to call home in blood and wood. I am afraid to leave again because there is a river as deep as Yensei between our ideologies already. My thoughts have no home. They live outside the windows. My mind and body are alive and separate and I am somehow still alive in this prison of not growth but where I grew up because I want to take them with me but they refuse to listen but this is for them too.


My work is for them too. My work is for my family though they do not read. My work is for my family so they can be free. My work is for my grandmother and mother and my aunts who live suckling the patriarchy though he need not it and sucking at him though they ought not. But they see not the poison flowing in as their power flows out to everything that is and was and will destroy me and them and the next kins being birthed, raised, graised by fluid and iron our tomorrow is dying. I must go. I must sow hope. I must bring life back. But this woman-hood of mine is lost. I am losing it and I feel as though I must be here to watch the last of it ebb away, melt down like hard milk be eaten up by tongues they think bring healing but which only have bellies full of blood, our blood.


I am scared of leaving because there might be nothing left to come back to. I might have started this journey too late. I might lose the people most important to me as our ideologies are split deeper. Where will I return to? How much more of a stranger will I be? Who will I be home to? Who will be home to me?