House VS Home
When you constantly feel as though you’re on the outside looking in,
when knocking on the door falls on deaf ears,
there comes a point when you have to walk away,
when the idyllic picture you’ve constructed of ‘home’ must be forgotten,
when you must start again.
Going back to the drawing board,
you must find a new home,
even if that means building your own.
With no experience (you’re not a builder),
you have no choice but to
‘learn on the job’,
scrambling for loose bricks on your hands and knees.
Quite literally building this thing from the ground up.
You’re on your own
and your hands hurt
and you grow tired
and you don’t know how you’re ever going to turn this pile of bricks into a house.
You’re ready to give up
until you feel a hand on your shoulder,
hands on your shoulder
and you realise that you’re not alone
and you find it within yourself the strength to keep going.
With a whole community behind you,
beside you,
on this journey with you,
you do a little bit every day until, one day, the pile of bricks becomes a house,
a home,
within which you have never felt happier,
never felt more ‘yourself.’
In letting go of one thing, you make room to build another,
you give yourself an opportunity to reconstruct all of the things which were, in another lifetime, a source of destruction
for you.
You
leave a house
to build a home-
allowing for the complete reconstruction of your ego-
bliss.
You spend your whole life locked out, hands cupped together as you look through the glass into a locked house for which you can see your family on the other side. You try the door but it’s locked. You bang on the window and they don’t even flinch.
‘Can they even hear me banging?’
Hands cupped together you peer through the glass, your family are standing right there at the window but they can’t see you. They don’t know you’re locked out. They don’t know the pain you feel, the homesickness, the longing for someone to let you in. They can’t see it, don’t know it because,
there you are.
Looking through the glass you’re in the kitchen, as a child, on your dads shoulders. It makes no sense but you can see it with your own eyes. You can see that you’re in the kitchen, with your family
but?
You’re not, you’re standing outside trying to get in. On the outside, looking in at yourself.
How is that even possible? How can you feel so homesick,
so alone,
when…
you’re not?
Whether it be in terms of sexuality, gender identity, love, friendships, relationships, political stance, religion, literally any aspect of yourself- leaving your house (all the things which you are told you ‘should’ be), to build a home (within which you can be whoever you want to be; who you are) is the greatest act of rebellion in a society that tells us all what to do, and who to be, constantly.
The poem above explores that sense of feeling homesick for a place you’ve never felt as though you belong-
the feeling of having a house
but
yearning for a home.
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