Did I come from somewhere? The nature of diaspora is reference. Reference to another land, another way of living. Without reference, I feel as though I have displacement. Displacement as identity. Grief, confusion, roots disintegrating into painfully necrotic tissue. Septic loss that might kill you if you feel it too much, if you stop running to something new.
I cry at any mention of familiarity, of home. Grieving for Home the same way I grieve for Mother. A place to rest and to know that everyone else seems to have. I cry when I sing songs in Chinese. When I was little I thought I belonged there, but that seems laughable now. I cry when I hear the Hatikvah, and that’s most certainly shameful now.
There’s a great emptiness in the foundations of my soul where home should be, and I try to find it anywhere – in learning each new neighborhood where I happen to find myself; in posters I stick on my wall; sometimes in men who hold me to their chest even when it suffocates me.
I thought I might make a home in my body, but it remains foreign to me - pins and needles where the world touches me.
Will my flesh deserve to rot in any land when the time comes?