Boxed up in cars All memories of ours are on the go Like footprints in snow
Autumn leaves change But I stay the same Green highways signs Just wave goodbye
I’m tired of living on the road I’m tired of leaving what I know
When will I find somewhere to call home Is it a place or someone I don’t know Where will I get my last set of keys Tell me to stay without without always leaving
My hearts content lies Left in cement It was permanent Or so you said
Same stars, same sky Same moon at night But its different ‘Cause you’re not in it.
I’m tired of leaving what I know I’m tired but now I gotta go
When will I find somewhere to call home Is it a place or someone I don’t know Where will I get my last set of keys Tell me to stay without without always leaving
Wishing on shooting stars To know, to stay, to be just where you are Am I close or are you far ‘Cause miles are like galaxies apart
Right now I have no where to call home It may be a place or someone I hope These will not be my last set of keys Wish I could stay but now Now I’m leaving
You had spent your entire life in one home:
your mom’s run-down condo in sleepy Antrim, New Hampshire where you
grew up eating inauthentic General Tso’s chicken at Ginger House and
picking up sesame bagels with cream cheese at Audrey’s
on Wednesdays,
knowing
everything
about your town,
your home, which step
in your staircase creaked,
the exact shape of the burn
mark on the left side of your fridge.
The mahogany closet in your basement where you used to curl up at age
4 to play hide-and-seek with your three sisters, the bookshelf you broke
then repaired at age 10, the army green quilt you received from your
grandma at age 13 that covers the twinbed in your room, in your home, in
your town.
By the time I met you I had lived in over 25 places in
Korea England
Tanzania
South Africa
Kenya
Lithuania
Chile U.S.A.
Some homes, some houses,
never
knowing
the houses
I lived
I was packing unpacking,
readjusting new places.
thrill of leaving Cockroach House,
bittersweet goodbye Mango Tree House,
Jacaranda House, the comings goings
formings memories, never feeling
rootedness.
And maybe that’s why we had to end our relationship:
I was a home to you, but you were just a house to me.
By Melanie Han, an avid traveler and a poet who was born in Korea, grew up in East Africa, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing in Boston. She has won awards from Boston in 100 Words and Lyric, and her poetry has appeared in several magazines and online publications, such as Fathom, Ruminate, and Among Worlds. During her free time, she can be found eating different ethnic foods or visiting new countries.
“The first year I came to this country, I swallowed down everything I had ever known and it slid down my throat into the darkness of secrets, or maybe just things nobody wanted to know. Either way I was empty, ready for the sunshine and breeze of this new world to wrap me up in a whirlwind strong enough to block out the rest. I should’ve known better, but somehow I still thought it would be that easy, that I would just keep my old secrets and build a new framework of identity and slide myself into it without losing too much. The first year I came to this country, I forgot everything I had ever learned and discovered a darkness of secrets inside of me big enough to block out the rest, but I lost too much.
In the end I found the pieces I needed, I dredged up my past and did not let it be forgotten. Instead I merged the old and the new together, weaving the different threads into a tangled mess of knots behind the scenes that nobody wanted to know about. I managed the chaos as carefully as walking on a black-night path except this time there was nobody to tell me how to do it with confidence and everybody was there to see when I tripped over the stump and landed in the thorns. Still, I wrapped my cloth around me like a bright mask or a new skin and when my new friends poked holes in it they discovered the whirling dances of a different country underneath, so they named me after my mix of colours and I blurred them all into something resembling stability. In the end I always knew that every story I told had holes and half-truths, but when I put them together they stacked into the pieces I needed to keep going so I held my chin high and taught myself confidence.
Sometimes, still, strangers ask questions. They see me and notice the blurred edges of my names, they catch glimpses of the holes in my skin and they wonder if I am really who they think I am. Mostly I reach into my jar of stories and I swirl the choices around and pick a truth to give them, something to cover up the things they don’t really want to know about. But sometimes I toss my head and laugh, unfurl the bright colours into a banner that declares – I am /never/ who you think I am – because I am not even who I think I am and I’m certainly not who I say I am and who am I anyway? Sometimes I spin in a dance they’ve never seen before and I tell them this too is me, sometimes I write them a poem full of foreign languages and can’t be bothered to interpret it. Sometimes, I am too much for them and I do not care because these are the pieces I need to make sure I don’t lose too much and the confusion of one stranger is a small price to pay for the gift of being complicated and confident.
You can’t catch me, I say, whirling away in a blur of secrets and stories colourful enough to block out the rest.
This year I met a stranger who tried. A stranger who chased after my trail of contradictions and picked up every half-truth I dropped along the way, came up to me with arms full of gathered pieces and told me – look I’ve found such a beautiful mess – as if the tangled knots of my underneath could ever be called beautiful. Messy, yes. I know my stories are messy, I know when my colours are spinning around me sometimes they stain the ground rainbow and I don’t know how to clean it up. But I held up the secrets I had hidden away in the darkness and discovered a mosaic of stained mess that even this country has chosen to name as art, and I wondered why it took a stranger to see that this too could be beautiful. Either way, I guess I was ready for the things nobody wanted to know to become the things I could choose to say, and I added them into my jar of stories imbued with every shred of confidence I have taught myself. After all, who else could show me how to wrap myself up in the sunshine and breeze of a new world without losing the pieces of my history that I needed, how to laugh at the edge of the night-dark and stand up to try again over and over until the blur of my stories swirled with confident colours? There was nobody there but me and the watching world.
So I built my secrets into a mosaic, turned the tapestry of my stories upside down and inside out to show the chaos, stacked my names into the holes of my half-truths and called it brave. Beautiful. A new kind of confident, a bold dance in the middle of the street with eyes flashing and feet stomping and hands clapping rhythms they learned somewhere far away and long ago, somewhere I cannot return but will not forget.
I’m not a line, I say these days. I’m a circle, looping back into myself like a repeating eight of infinity, an endless beautiful mess.”
What keeps you here I ask my heart Stranger in a strange land, so white, so clean
These fields in June, she laughs Your red-stained fingers A taste of heaven beneath each leaf And this sky expansive and clear
I wonder why, my heart, you hold Steady on small delights after Months of sifting memories Under grey skies Testing each day as we Walk out into this not-all-bad But still foreign place
I am young, says she – A child who races, explores, Finds beauty even here And welcomes the new, trusting Inviting sweet existence even Within this space of not belonging
I hold out for Simple Wonders; Encounters with the Presence
Crouched amongst the rows I ponder this Sifting through the too-soon and the already-past I find it. The ripest, the reddest berry Welcomes me into the perfect balance Proves to me that Yes, child, even here, even you, Have abundant peace. The taste and texture of now.
By Bree Becker, a third culture kid from Rwanda and Kenya who now lives in Oregon, USA.
Do you know how many times I have moved? Sometimes I count them on my fingers, fistful after fistful of tears swollen in my throat and I try to remember every single one but I can’t.
Too many. Too many times, it’s the only number that fits the emotion and I know this won’t make sense to you but my hands are full of this place now and I can’t hold any more.
When I open my palms the memories are dripping out and I’m afraid if I stay longer I will forget.
I don’t want to forget.
Do you know how many times I have moved? When I sleep I dream of muted whispers in languages you don’t speak and when I wake up I write songs about the dusty grass of places you’ve never been and sometimes when you hold my hand I imagine the worlds I have known imprinted on my palm, burning you in your ignorance. How could anyone expect you to love something as fragmented as me?
I tried, I really tried to unclench my fists of memories, to open up my hands and belong. But every time I look at my palm I see the lines of roads leading other places and I can’t stop tracing them, can’t stop aching to leave. I can’t be part of a whole world; everything is random moments and I am disconnected from the planned future.
I’m not here to stay. I’m never here to stay.
You asked me tonight to go out with you, tired grin through voice texting and I wanted to say no.
But instead I said yes and I drove on these winding roads that never lead to other places and I opened my hands to you. I stayed another day, I spilled a few more memories and let you matter a little bit more – I loved.
Do you know how many times I have moved?
Too many, it’s the only answer that fits and when I tell you I love you I want you to think of that. I don’t know how to be a part of just one world, how to hold your hand and love and be loved without being burned by the smallness of the story.
Staying here is like being trapped, and I value freedom. But even more than freedom, I value you.
This is a TCK’s love poem, telling you how badly I want to leave in hopes that you will understand how deeply you matter…
It’s okay if you don’t understand.
There is a vast difference between us, a Sahara Desert of sandy separation but I’m trying (please tell me you can see that I’m trying) not to keep my distance.
It’s my desert. And every day I stay the liquid memories leak out of my hands into the sand and I think, I think, new life is growing here. New life, small and green and fragile, hopeful and timid.
So I will grow a trail of oasis across this desert, copy for you the map of roads on my palms and let you destroy this distance I have always kept.
But I’m not making promises.
One day I will add another number to “too many” and I will shut my fists tight around these memories and I will leave.
But today is not one day, and for now I am busy growing life in a desert with you.
Just don’t keep your distance, and I won’t keep mine.
1. I wrote something today even though I had nothing to say there is too much music here too many people who say what I want to say better than I ever could.
So I find myself sucked into the information age and suddenly time means something. Once upon a time I had read every book available to me but now, I could never do that.
Once (or twice) there I went a whole day without ever looking at a clock. Time is just a word there but here it is what they (we?) live by.
2. Someone asked me, yesterday, the one question none of us can answer – “Where are you from?” And I wanted to say “nowhere” or “everywhere” or “God” or “Africa” or any number of other things but suddenly I didn’t have the energy to explain again so I said “Pennsylvania.” After all, I know people there. It is as good a place as any other for me to pick.
But really, who I am now is only a fleeting identity. Maybe tomorrow I will be someone else – speak another language and claim another place as my hometown, or maybe I won’t.
But for now, for today, this is who I am and what I am for those who ask me that (such a stupid question. I am a person, of course!) And here I stand temporarily permanent.
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