Where is home?
It’s a question that erases the glow of the mid-month moon, that silences the birds returning to their nest, that closes the curtains on the kitchen balcony so the morning tastes bitter without my mother’s eyes. Memories pour down like a waterfall, images of our home falling without clear features, like an old woman crossing the street watching the bumps on the pavement expand and shrink under the sharp sun and its struggle with the clouds. Or it’s a film, the sea painted gray like the sky and the eyes of the hero’s beloved. Or it’s my heart trembling for the first time with joy simply because it survived death by accident.
Where is home?
I ask myself when I visit my solitude, smiling to God as if I could see His face. I send it to the angels of the sky so they can tell Him about me, about my home, without me asking Him directly. Where is the morning if not in the embrace of my home? Then I wipe my cheek so no one envies me for the rain my cloud just gave. I rest my head on the edge of memory to make the jump easier, and it pulls me inside little by little. I see my room, my wall covered with medals, drawings from my friends, and without meaning to I step on my cat’s tail. She screams with a meow that makes me fall and hit this reality.
Where is home?
I search on Google Maps, though I never used it in my city. We never needed anything to guide us to the heart of the alleys of our mothers’ lives. What I find is an unfinished picture, showing God’s gentle reproach to me, so I smile remembering my father’s words: “Whoever loves you will scold you.”
Where is home?
The problem is not in finding the answer. The disaster is that this question even haunts me, when I am the one who loved every corner of that house.
