By Keziah Enders

There has to be a reason why home is always curved so loosely around my belongingness. A reason why home’s fluid roots keep seeking out their own expiry. Why my bone-home compass doesn’t point in any one direction. Why every new home spits out my body and blows me away toward another home waiting to escape me.

I would like to really look at the now foggy garlic city I was planted in. The country that raised me. All the places scented with wild rose and rice water. All the homes mama planted, scrubbed, and warmed. I want to dissect all the loves that bypassed me. I want to study the workings of ownership to understand why it is that claiming possession of a thing seems to be what makes it strip itself, run mad, self-destruct. No matter if it began oiled in romance. No matter how many sweet things once lived there.

I have memorized childhood: the ease of wriggly heat rising from the coal pot, the way the smell of garlic in stew and short bread wrapped itself around us. Before the labels of things were old enough to stick to things, to us, to days. When everything was still to come and ideas were so alive they leaked out of pillowcases and spilled everywhere, all mucky with possibility.

Now I collect mangoes from the soursop tree. I bury fish heads in the garden. I bottle up memories and forget to put the lid back on. 

It is a tragedy really. Not about all these memories themselves. Not that time will eventually leave us behind, or that this body keeps a record of all my stupidity. It is the realization that I have become more disbelief than trust. More almost than now. And of all the people I’ve loved, I’ve loved myself the least.

On late nights, my bed doesn’t do it for me anymore. Not the ‘it’ of soft remembering. Not the ‘it’ of wasteful laughter. All my realities have tied themselves shut. My desire has grown illiterate and the only word my desperation knows is ‘no’.

This is the land of raging appetites, where days lean forward embracing their own transparency, where minutes shiver under the weight of so much hoping, so much praying, all this yearning. The weekends are tainted the color of bitter drinks. Time dissolves like salt in hot soup. Like a sort of sweet ache, understanding settles into my body and the arrival fallacy sits by the door staring back at me, mad.

All I do now is carry it around with me. It meaning: longing for home. It being: willing myself not to spill into tiny pieces every time I fall from love. I can’t tell you what part of my young dream I currently occupy. Curiosity for such things has left this body on its own, to its own vices, behind unhinged doors and underneath cumbersome clothes.

Still, somewhere in the now of half-expectant and half-already-forgotten, we stroll together along the only square block of space in which nothing can reach us. We smother laughter as well as new love. Day turns to dusk and I remember the thread of really living: sweet drinks, bleached lace, laughter.

In the days to come, the sun will set and I will finally learn the significance of making a home in my own body, of cultivating benches in place of walls, gardens in place of graveyards. We will listen intently to recycled philosophies. We will laugh in the face of all the delays, the grim madness, and laugh a ransom to time.

Let ruin end here.

Let this be the healing.

Let this home hold me 

for once

Let it be.

Photo by ExploreWithTunde via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Photo by ExploreWithTunde via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

About the Author

KezzyJo is a Liberian architect, writer, copywriter, and multidisciplinary creative currently based in Côte d’Ivoire. Her work explores longing, womanhood, memory, displacement, intimacy, and the quiet emotional landscapes people carry within themselves. She writes prose and poetry that sit at the intersection of tenderness and ache on the way to self discovery. 

Readers can find more of her work on instagram at @kezzyjo and on Substack via Brown Study.