Quarantine Diaries: Belonging & Loneliness

("Bedroom in Arles" #2 - Vincent Van Gogh, 1889)

CW/TW: mentions of rape, mental health, body traumas

          They say study/work from home, but now a house is forced to be a workplace, a classroom, a home, to be fun, purposeful, to be a trigger and shelter all at once... I don't live in my own home, like a mermaid drowning, I swim to survive. How do you work from home when a house is not a house but a swamp: where you cry yourself to sleep, when you stay up at night to feel, writing of questions and prayers never answered... We can call it self-reflection, but I know it to be self-destruction.

          I always say that home is where water flows, but it also shows true and vulnerable to my uncertainty with belonging. During a time where we are asked to stay "home", I couldn't help but wonder of how that means diversely across experiences and expressions. Those who have left their homes in search of betterment, those separated from homes by force, those in desperate search of refugee and shelter... in contrast with those who have multiple locations of "home", those who have intersectional and diverse roots of home, those who have a choice of "home"... Such privilege maybe, but many with chosen homes/families are only by a choice of survival. My homeland is Taiwan, my chosen family is in Tkaronto (Toronto), and my discourse of home is still wherever water flows. It is connected with my belief that the home to our humanity is tied through the source of life: water. (also as an Earth sign, water feels vital and essential to the fluidity and freedom of my breath)

          Yet the social politics of belonging, something I have been observing and reflecting on myself, really is also the art of feeling lonely, as well as the discourse of visibility - which all can also be layered with the politics of desirability, but that's for another day. I came to understand that such complications and conflicts manifest through the instability within the homebody (the self). As a survivor it is hard to believe in the poetics of my body being a temple, but I do believe that the body is holy in essence, glorious in all its flaws and imperfections. And still til this day, the violence in my mind always harms the body...

She sleeps where she was raped
Sheets washed but stained
Scents gone but memories stay
She turns and turns
She tucks herself in
She turns into a corner
She prays please to no one
She cries pleasing herself
She pleads praise for nothing
She whispers of love poems and
She writes for her eulogies where
She sleeps to escape -
Stairs and naps leading to traps
She wanders for safety
She wonders for sanity