April 4: Home

"These young girls do not know it, and I cannot tell them, but I have discovered that past and present blur together, become one and the same, so that time means very little at the end." - Kim Edwards

When I reach home,

the afternoon turns the colour of gold.

Memory lights up the smiles and soothes

the bruises on the walls, the cracks in your voice,

the hollow spaces and the restlessness.

I search for comfort wherever I go

but poetic justice declares that I will find it here:

in the bed I slept in when I was eight, the room

I ran away from, in the city I hated like a disease.

Comfort where once there was unease and movement

settling into my bones like an unseen tremor.

Alone in that bed, scent of the past wrapping around me

like mist or music, listening to father and sister watching

sitcoms in the next room - every sound magnified,

the whirring of the fan and crinkling pages of books

resting against bare thighs and brown arms.

Walls covered with crayon drawings, shelves filled

to bursting with odds and ends, ragged toys and leftover

board games with missing parts - where I lost little bits

of myself as a child, under the bed, behind cupboards,

tucked into childhood books like bookmarks -

I don't need to search there, just sit.
Let myself breathe in the music of this moment.

Hope will find its way home,
it's lived here for too long.