A Home in Your Own Skin

It's been a long one. I realised in January that I was done running, done reinventing, done leaving: I was going to learn to stay.

And I have been. I have been working, more than anything else these past few months, to come home to myself.

A home is only a home because of the space inside. We all have that hole in our chest, that empty space in our stomach. We try to fill it with a person who doesn't fit right, a hobby which flickers out when the depression hits, money which will always disappear, vanity which will always come back sour. It's a familiar story: the love stories tell us that only one true romantic love can fill the void; the motivational speeches tell us only pursuing our career passion can; the Bible studies teacher tells us that the ache is a longing for God.

I should backtrack: that last one converted me to Christianity. I still believe it. But I'd spent a fair few years trying to make clumsy prayers and a weekly meeting with people who told me I had to stop being queer to love Jesus properly fill that hole, and that wasn't right either. God was there, but He doesn't fill the hole for us.
So I asked myself, my therapist, my counsellor, the world: how do I fill it?

And the echo came back from the cavern in my stomach:

Why does it need to be filled?

This aching empty space in my chest is as much a part of me as my rising lungs, as my scarred fingers, as my short-sighted eyes. You don't need to fill up the space. A home is only a home because of the space inside.

I'm writing this on a hostel bed in Morocco. Three hours ago I was shaking, trying to hold back tears, forcing myself to recover from the gut-churning shame and terror of being stranded in a foreign city on my own, from the injustice of proving everyone right who had warned me that I was unsafe as a "lone white female", from the dissociation of wondering if this was how I died - disappointing my father after he explicitly told me how not to get robbed and murdered in Morocco - after all the bullshit I'd been through to survive this far.
I showered. I considered my options. I forgave myself. I sat on the roof terrace for a few hours reading. I made a plan to be better prepared next time.
And while I read and considered and recovered, the Muslim call to prayer began to ring through the city.

It feels like a hollow comparison, like it shouldn't be mine to claim. A white queer of Jewish descent, converted in their late teens to Christianity? How dare I find peace in another's religion, another's culture, tradition?
But I did. Every single day in the corner of the library basement where I studied, the call to prayer would come from the dilapidated, unmarked converted-seminar room makeshift Mosque which backed against the window I sat beside. Almost every day, for three years. The same call. The same words. The same intonation. The same song. The same faith. Half a world apart. I hadn't considered that I might miss the call to prayer when I graduated, but I was glad to hear it now.

And wherever I am, I am home.

I'm writing this in the same notebook on a hostel bed in Luxembourg. It's been over a month of traveling, of finding the home in my own skin in an enormous world. There's a thousand stories I could tell, amazing things and weird things and hilarious things and things that were actually upsetting at the time (e.g. nearly drowning in Venice - that's another post), but at the moment I'm just contemplating home.

I'm writing this from a train station floor in Brussels. Trains delayed and cancelled, staff unhelpful, bag too heavy, journey almost over, grades unsatisfactory, heart broken - I've spent weeks exploring every corner of the continent and seeing amazing things, taking problems as they come, but in the end it's news from home that breaks me. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. I've ridden on the back of a scooter through rush hour traffic in Morocco. I've been caught in a Venetian storm huddling in a shaking doorway with an elderly woman who I couldn't bring myself to leave alone. I've watched the sun set and rise in a dozen different cities.

But what was the point of all of it if I'm just gonna get back to the place I live and break open completely again?

It comes to me in my own lamentations.

I sat on the end of a pier in paradise - a deserted island near Borneo, wild jungle behind me and a coral reef below my feet. I watched the sun set between the islands, over the ocean. And as it did, I watched someone... They must have lived on one of the islands. And as I sat and watched, they paddled out in a kayak, into the middle of that empty space between the islands. And they put away their paddle, and they sat in their kayak in the middle of the infinite empty ocean, and they watched the sun set. And then, they paddled home.

I'm writing this from my desk in Swansea. People's hate has done such awful harm. But the world is so wondrous. And it's there, with me. When it becomes overwhelming - these things that are too close to home, the hateful people who live nearby, the nightmares that wake me sobbing, the flashbacks that come in a cold sweat and a flush of itching bones at the wrong moment - I breathe out their cruelty, and I breathe in a sunset over the ocean in Borneo, and a person in a kayak paddling out to watch it every night, and a Venetian storm, and a Moroccan traffic jam, and an ancient Italian woman's withered hands in mine.

I'm writing this from a sunset in Borneo. I hope you find yours.

A home is only a home for the empty space inside -

we do not criticise the sky for

holding nothing but the sky,

do not criticise the stars for hanging in

"empty space",

rather than being printed on the Earth's ceiling.

They say that if our atoms were the size of planets,

there would be more space between each of them

than between the two farthest stars in the galaxy.

Think of that:

galaxies in your body,

between every cell;

that hollow space no more empty than a cloudless night sky;

 your soul infinite,

illuminated by sunsets wrought

in every shade of gold,

a space beautiful for its emptiness,

not a building or person or monument in sight -

just space

and light

and you,

paddling out into the middle of the ocean

every night

to watch the sun set

and know that you are home.

You are home.

(c) Tatiana Webb, 2019