Home?

What I loved about David Roderick’s poems in 'Blue Colonial' was that they were all incredibly descriptive—I read them as a collection of images in my mind that connected together to form a deeper meaning. That inspired me. Even though my piece is more of an exploration of what “home” is, I’ve tried to make it as visual as I could while simultaneously trying to talk about what home means to me as an intangible concept.

When I close my eyes, and think of home, I think of being at the back of the car—My dad is driving- a little too fast for my taste-- but then since the car accident I was in, anything that goes above the limit of 60 km/h has become fast for me-- my mother is sitting next to him. And I’m at the back. I feel like throwing up. So, I crack open the window and breathe in deeply. The air feels thick in my lungs- and tastes a bit fowl in my mouth, but I keep breathing because that’s all that I can do to make the feeling go away. I lean back, trying to bury my face into the seat, and turn up the music on my ipod. It’s night and we’re driving- it doesn’t matter where- it doesn’t matter whether we’re going to someplace or coming back from somewhere, what’s important is that we’re moving. I look outside the window, if I look at the sky- framed by street lights, for long enough, I can always spot a few stars twinkling weakly behind all the pollution. And then there is the moon— following us. I can still remember the feeling of the road beneath us, the bumps in the road that always make my mother nervous. When I think of home, I’m sitting at the back of the car and thinking of where I would be ten years down the line. And I guess that that’s a little strange because when I think of home, I can never picture the bustling markets where my friends and I would spend the weekends or just the city with all its history and thousands of people who somehow manage to exist together. Because that’s what home was to me. A complicated mix of feelings that I spent eighteen years trying to untangle. I spent many nights in my room, reading, reading, reading about places I had never been to—I spent a lot of time on Tumblr, I reblogged that quote, which went something like this—“I’m nostalgic for places I’ve never been and people I’ve never met” everytime I saw it. I have been nostalgic for as long as I remember- its become a state of being for me, my own twisted safety blanket that keeps me warm at night. A constant longing for things unknown. When I think of home, I’m sitting at the back of the car, moving because that’s what was always important- to keep moving—because they said that home was where the heart was- but my heart was nowhere and if I ever stopped moving, how would I ever discover the place where my heart belonged? Maybe that’s why I’ve always been so carsick. Maybe its not travel sickness- maybe its the ache of a heart that’s hopelessly lost. But in the moving pictures of my mind, I also see my father smiling into the rearview mirror, because he knew that I could see him and that that smile belonged to me, I also remember my mother looking back at me- her brows creased in worry but her mouth twisted up in half a smile. So it’s hard for me to think of home in concrete terms- I can only do so in choppy sentences and words that stand independently and a little bit alone. What is home? It’s a feeling. It’s the suffocating blanket of nostalgia. It’s the smiles of my parents. It’s the cars on the street going somewhere. What is home? I’m not a hundred percent certain- but its 

not a place I’ve been to yet. 

-Smriti Bansal