home sweet home
(sometimes it looks like halloween, four years ago)
These days I’ve been sitting on thin carpeting that never loses a strange smell, in cramped backseats, on itchy grass while whispering my greatest confession: “I don’t have a home anywhere. I don’t have a place I belong to.” This is greeted with good-natured smiles, soft hugs, doubtful glances. “Of course, you have a home, Nia. You can go back whenever you want.” The reason for varying responses is clear. My confession is not, of course, true. I have a home. Perhaps the problem that is more difficult to express is having too many. It’s so much easier to say I don’t have a home to return to than to say I am stretched between state lines and embraces that cannot contain me. Home isn’t a physical place, it’s an untethered ideal. I don’t often mention this part. How I’ve found home in short phone calls, one AM Mcdonalds runs, sleepovers with delirious ramblings, sobs in the middle of grocery stores.
How long do you have to leave for the mold to settle in floorboards, in bones? Homes might always exist: until you enter the threshold after time away and find everything has rotted in your absence.
Isn’t this the fear I speak of, the one that sparks poetic confessions? Being forgotten, maybe, or maybe never having mattered at all. Perhaps it’s simpler than that. The desire to sit still and not have to do anything to earn a legacy is overwhelming. What if I return and I haven’t become what I said I would? I am not better or wiser. My poems sound the same, my essays mock my potential.
I have this dream. It comes to me infrequently but nonetheless I can make out its hazy figure. In the dream there is love. So much love I can’t contain it. So much love it overfills the mixing bowl, trickles down the counters, seeps into cracked tile.
Sometimes in the dream I am in the presence of someone I knew once, someone who once held me when I was tired. But this is a dream and there is no being tired in dreams because I am already sleeping. So I am held by sweet memories and there is no tiredness, no fighting, no needing to stand up.
A few weeks ago it was A sitting next to me. I remember it well: the dream and the night. There were people around us but she held my worries with a soft smile, we sat on the floor of a hotel room and a football game was on the TV behind us. Crumpled candy wrappers scattered by my foot, an empty container of orange Halloween Oreos on the coffee table behind us. A is a friend whose kindness I will never forget. I knew it was a dream because it’s the only place she exists now, the only place I will find her without grief. A understands me and this is the whole dream. She is sitting on the floor with me and there is no hurry to get up. She tells me that I am good, better than I believe or give myself credit for. I’m outside of myself, observing the scene, A is talking to me as I was four years ago and telling her she doesn’t have to hold any of it on her own.
This dream has many variations. Sometimes the person sitting next to me is someone I no longer know, sometimes it is someone I talked to the day before, sometimes it is a defiance of grief and the honoring of love as a legacy. Whoever it is: they talk to me, and I just sit. I let their words wash over me.
They hold the exhaustion for as long as they can. Nothing ever happens. I just sit, and there is love, and there is nothing I need to do to earn it.
When I wake up, it’s to a vague sense of disappointment at the fact that the morning isn’t as kind as simple dreams. I sit up and I groan at the sun. I look up at the ceiling and sigh. I could move to get up, but I don’t. I just sit and think about the dream, about the freeness, the lack of exhaustion. When I think more about it, I smile. I am alone but somehow the day is already a little bit kinder. The morning isn’t as grating as it had seemed seconds before.
It’s not a dream, or even a memory. It’s a reminder of home. Every time I have one of these dreams, I remember the people that have made a home in my heart. Even if they don’t remember my name, their footprints cannot be erased.
The dream is so beautiful in its simplicity. It is the proof that homes don’t rot in my absence, walls don’t cave in at my sadness. I’ve made a home in small kindnesses and lessons learned with tired eyes.
Of course I have a place I belong to, of course I have a home. I remember now. I remember the open arms and unending warmth.
I’m sorry I ever forgot.
I am coming to terms with my own stanzas and sadness. Pop quiz: do you miss who you used to be? When I’m happy I call it a poor coping mechanism or an off day. October 22nd, 2022
Fall always does this to me, finds new ways to bend my spirit. October 13th, 2022
Hanging floral print curtains in the windows of my mind. Seeing everything through rose-colored lenses. June 27th, 202
my writing <3
Summer Solstice , Same Faces Collective
Poem I had published in August.
Crying in my Prom Dress, Unfiltered Magazine
Personal essay I began writing right after my high school prom. I think it’s one of my favorite essays I’ve ever written, a lot more storytelling driven than some of my previous works.
some of my fav reads
Dishwater Burrito by Brittney Uecker on the Taco Bell Quarterly
I read this for the first time this summer, and it is currently my all-time favorite essay. It’s repulsive and so well-written; there isn’t much writing that can actually make me gag, but this essay achieves it. In the best way possible.
Driving Lessons , a poem by Emma Chan on The Aurora Journal
songs
The Giver by Sarah Kinsley
man by quinnie
Homesick by Noah Kahan (but really the whole album)
Junio by Maluma
Cruel by Vale
That’s all for today! I did mean to be consistent with my newsletter when I posted my last essay in July, but the transition to college has proved to be more chaotic than I expected. Or at least, some of it I anticipated, I just thought I’d still be writing despite it. Nonetheless, you’ll hear from me here in December. In the meantime, I’m wishing you sweet dreams, beautiful makeshift homes, and remarkability in any way it finds you.
-Nia Mahmud :)