home is where the heart is
- By Adrianne Cheung
- •
- 07 Dec, 2019
Late in the spring of my twenty-ninth year, I went home.
Rather I returned to the city that birthed me, to its hot dusty desert fumes. The deep green sea rolling against the shore, my view from the window of the apartment I rented for two months this season.
In this city, cradle of my maker, I do not sleep well. I am restless as the waves that crash against the yellow sand. The uneasy waters make me nauseous, old memories of the deep dredged up from the silt like shipwrecks. The gulls outside, they circle like vultures, squawking all the while. The smell of salt and anxiety assaults my senses.
What the sea takes it does not give back.
The days pass slowly here - I am haunted by a gnawing in my gut. The food here is good, green grapes and warm bread, rich wine and herbal teas, flavours of the oriental and of the isles. It is the taste of my childhood, but this hollowness is not caused by hunger and thus not satiated by eating.
In the kitchen I do not linger. Here I am plagued by old memories. It must have been a decade ago now, perhaps more. Breakfast then was a quiet affair, poaching eggs by the stove, with vinegar and a gentle hand. In ’09, had I learned it then already? The trick? She liked hers soft-boiled, the brown shell cracked-open, its innards pale as snow. The yolk within still runny, spilt like blood.
Not blood but ichor: the old gods, they bled gold.
Sometimes when I cannot rest, I wander the old city. I lose weeks that way, lost in a fever dream somewhere between the past and present. My walk is aimless, my steps thoughtless. In the sand I take off my shoes to feel it hot between my toes, crumbling under the weight of sorrows.
Empires could be destroyed this way, crushed beneath the stomp of a giant.
It feels like yesterday that I saw them touch down on this shore. The children there, they knelt and kissed the ground. Thank you, they said, thank you, and felt my city fold around them like an embrace. Welcome home, child, she would whisper, loving, a mother’s caress. Welcome home. As if it were that easy.
Between narrow side-streets I have no map but I am not lost, never lost. I retrace the steps I took here many years ago, steps I thought I had forgotten. I am not lost in this labyrinth, the womb of my creator, where under the sun-baked dirt hot enough to fry an egg lives another civilisation - bones buried among roman cisterns, lead arrowheads, silver jewellery, bronze jugs. Thousands of years old.
Who am I, to disturb their rest?
I try not to think of her among them now. It seemed like eons ago now that she emerged from the sea, a pathetic imitation of Venus, nothing more than a collection of pointy elbows and knobbly knees, raven hair plastered to her pale forehead. Soaked to the bone, shivering in just a t-shirt and shorts. Her and the rest of them, gathered like mourners, that evening on the beach.
The ocean spat them out like an offering.
I cannot, I wanted to say. I have nothing left to give you. Suture my heart and lock it away, never to be touched again. Keep it sterile, keep it safe. But I could not turn away.
My feet take me to the temple. It is abandoned now, a crumbling shell of its former self. Inhabited only by ghosts and spiders. It is dark, dust-covered. It is a graveyard, nothing but stones left to commemorate the dead.
I could build a castle out of the stones I owe my dead.
