Recognizing Homeland

It’s funny how home can be a place of

Raised voices and

Bitter memories

Home can be a place that you

Avoid whenever you can

Ten months ago, I left my mother

To stay with my father,

Looking for home

Ten months later, I live with my father,

Missing my mother,

Still looking for home

Ten months from now, I may live on my own

Maybe then I’ll find my home

Or maybe I will keep on missing

What I’ve left behind

It’s funny how home can be a place

Of so many mistakes

And long-held grudges

You keep on loving but

No matter

How hard you try,

Things always fall apart

Sisters resent sisters,

Daughters resent parents,

Parents resent daughter,

Grudges in a cycle

They all resent the way that things have been and they feel

Helpless

Why can’t things be better

The past is traumatic

The present is hard

The future is terrifying

Why can’t it be easy

For once

Why can’t everything be good

Years upon years of anger and fears

We’re all damaged goods

The shouting, the tears

No, I don’t feel grateful for

“Learning to be resilient”

Those hardships didn’t give me

Strength, I had to find my own strength

Just to get through the hardships in the first place

It’s funny how home can be a place

Where the neighbors are strangers or just

Look down on you because you’re

Not a stupidly happy, perfectly insipid suburban family

No roots, or as they say these days, no

“Network,” like

Relationships are just transactions

No roots

Not every homeland lets you put down roots

There was one time I was walking on the hill

At sunset

I looked down at

the neighborhood winding below

Clean streets, green lawns

Warm light from windows

Cream houses roofed with red-orange ceramic tiles

Gathered in the sort-of valley at the base of

A mountain covered in shrubby plants like it was

Tucked in a shrubby quilt before bed and

In the sunset, it all looked kind of beautiful and

In that moment it felt like

Home

I never felt that way about it before

It’s funny how you don’t always recognize

Homeland

Because home can be so

Complicated