Home is where I suffer for you.

Sometimes in the midst of an adrenaline storm, when you’re on your knees and every part of your body feels like it has been assaulted, you catch a glimpse of yourself in a reflective surface that makes you wonder why. Why are you doing this? Why is this sex to you? Why is this love? And in that moment, when a single tear emerges from your eye and the light bounces off it like a diamond, you realise that the quest for meaning can take you to strange places. In refraction, there is uncomfortable truth that turns the meaning of sight on its head. I don’t know if this strange place has meaning. I loathe the idea that it may, and I cannot stand the notion that I may have come here in search of it. Surely, meaning is found in the service of humanity, and not in the appeasement of a merciless god.

- 23 October 2019. 1953 hrs.

I wrote these words six-years ago. One of the consequences of being a person who unrelentingly records life is that I can look back through it in explicit detail with ease. It’s catalogued, transcribed and everything. As I read through my life, every minute transition, every inconsequential detail and every indulgence in insanity is recorded. My whole life is here in my journals. I’ve spent decades putting it in here. In one of her journals, Anais Nin wrote something that struck at the core of me.

“The need of immediate recording incites me to write almost as I am living,” she wrote, “Before it is altered, changed by distance or time.”

I *understand* that.

The moment, the present, is the most elusive state to capture in its purest form, it is about as plausible as being able to distil the scent of a person into a vial and sniff them into existence. By the time you pull out a pen, it is already moving backwards and I understand the frenzy of trying to catch up to it so well. A part of me moves forward in time, and another part of me, is stuck on the path of capturing *this moment* in words, like a hamster running on a wheel. I want my words frozen in exact encapsulations of time. Unaltered by any vestige of the future. As true as they can be in the moment. Distance and time have altered me, changed me, and in some ways, I am no longer the person who wrote those words, but it is more fun to be able to look back at myself as I truly was, not coloured or swayed by the tinted-glasses of romanticised retrospect. Not cognisant of elements yet to emerge. Of patterns that have already left traces. Of life-changing transitions that were already in motion. It’s nice to see myself as a character who has no idea what will happen to her, even though, I already know.

I remember that time fondly. We lived on the third-floor of the building. My neighbour was named after a cave. There was a pigeon named Hector living in our laundry-room. Later in the year, I turned the laundry room into a dungeon and on one strange evening, when my owner left me locked up in there for a while, I talked to Hector. I hate birds and I’m terrified of them, but I never learnt not to engage with things that scare and repel me. If, in terms of evolution, fear was meant to indicate that one should flee, then I’m about as much an evolutionary mistake as Hector. Those days, I was scared a lot. I was scared of where we lived, of seeing bomb-squads stationed in various corners of the compound. I was scared of what was going on in that region and how hopeless it all seemed. I was so scared of the man I love; he spent so much time terrorizing me, locking me in with pigeons and dragging me to forests in the middle of the night to smear dirt into my face, and wounds.

I am still so scared of him. There are a lot of things we leave behind. Laundry rooms that served as dungeons where other families now reside. That spot under the mulberry tree where I always parked the car much to the chagrin of everyone else in my family. My blood on the walls that have probably been painted-over several times now. There is a lot that never made it out of the year 2019, but my fear of him goes where I go.

Like a warm blanket.

It’s hard not to find meaning in that. It’s hard to keep loathing the notion that I could. I think, for a long time, I had dedicated my life to being existentially flippant, and in particular, of never letting myself find too much meaning in the rituals of power and pain. You know how it is. A peculiarity of our times is that you’re told and taught to be enough in yourself, you’re taught to avoid dependence, you’re told to look for salvation in self-actualisation and hyper-independence. You must hold your own meaning.

What if I want none of my own?

What if the most meaning I’ve ever found is in being his?

There is joy and a sense of duty to serving humanity, but it doesn’t feel like my place as much as serving as the warm spot on the floor upon which he rests his feet. There is thrill and satisfaction to accomplishment, but it doesn’t excite me in quite the same way as when he holds my head in his fist and promises a world of pain. There is happiness in knowing myself and caring for myself, but it doesn’t feel like I belong until I am on my knees, and every inch of my body is throbbing in evidence of his assault. There is a lot in the world I enjoy, but there is nothing other than him, that feels like home. Maybe home is all the meaning I get. Maybe it is all the meaning I seek. Maybe it is okay to seek meaning in love, especially in a world where I could define myself solely by what I do and be lauded. Maybe in that world, home is dystopian haven where I can excavate for meaning.

Home is where I worship a merciless god. It is where I run towards fear. Home is always now. Home is unchanged and unaltered even by distance and time.