I am home.

Thin flakes delicately dancing on my tongue. Crispiness crinkling into little fragments as I bite deeper and deeper into its layers, each level getting slightly chewier and chewier until my teeth hit a bed of soft white savoury creaminess. A simple flavour rests in my mouth, allowing the love embedded in its molecules to enter through my sixth sense and down to the centre of my chest. Flashes to mountains and rivers and fields in the countryside; generations and generations of mothers and grandmothers and their mothers and mothers’ mothers passing this beacon of love to their children, tying families together in a warm embrace.

Her hazel eyes sparkle as she sits in the seat next to me, admiring the city where she spent the first years of her life. A slice of home shining on her plate, almost as brightly as she is.

Golden. Soft. Radiant. Love.

You are what you eat.



I feel the warmth of her home, but where is my own?



Oh, how I long for its warm embrace. For the orange glow floating out a thin glass window at the end of the slushy street. My northern star contrasting against the cool blue tone of the evening snow. Nostrils crispy and burning in the freezing bite of the air. I cover the throbbing red tips of my ears with my bare hands to prevent them from going black.

This view of the small snaking road leading to mom’s front steps flashing to thousands of time I’ve walked the same path home. Mom out on the grass, pulling up mountains of dandelions as the buds of trees began to bloom, waving over to me from afar. My legs and arms burning up in the summer heat as my brother and I sliced through the road to finish off yet another hasty run. My silhouette wobbling under streetlights as whiskey from the liquor cabinet flowed through my teenage veins.

As I walk past the tree my brother and I used to climb, hop up the front steps and the screech of the white screen door opening echos through the entire block, the sweet smell of mom’s home cooking melts away the troubles of the outside world along with the white crystals in my eyebrows and nostril hairs. The cold outside can’t reach us in here.

The sound of my brother clacking away on his keyboard draws me into the living room, where a shimmering green acoustic guitar sits in the corner. I pick her up, holding her in my hands, ancient wooden neck resting in my left palm, her thick, coily steel strings massaging my fingertips. The metallic scent flashes me back to when I first picked her up over a decade ago. The vibrations embedded in the fibres of her wooden curves are ancient. Years and years of love and heartbreak and joy and frustration have bled into the fabric of her being. Her body: a shimmering, deep green, the kind of green my colourblind eyes can’t quite see, oddly similar to brown, yet simultaneously reminiscent of the pacific algae that grow where my mother gave birth to me.

Strumming down on six strings that sing as an extension of my heartstrings, the harmonious sound creating order through the air, a whirlwind of loving energy swimming through the invisible fluid keeping us alive. I breathe in these vibrations. They sustain me. I taste their sweetness on my tongue. I feel the grass beneath my feet as dandelions burst open across open fields. A whole meadow of yellow. Buttercup golden fields. Old trees to sit under. Laughter of friends. Dancing. Singing. Together. My heart full. My lungs deep. My throat open. My eyes clear. My heart pounding.



Thump, thump, thump.



Beating in my chest the same way Dad’s leathery, weathered hands would pound little silver slivers into the wall. There he would be, down in the basement, sweating his ass off in his worn blue jeans, the kind with little dancing white strings flying around his ankles. Dusty brown streaks tattered across the blue denim canvas, accented with splatters of white paint and calking. Determination in his deep eyes, salty trickles dripping down his forehead, soaking his loose, ratty old white tee shirt from some corporate event back in ‘97. The swirling scent of sawdust, paint and dirt reminding me of the years and years of Sunday mornings where the soothing sounds of sawing and hammering and drilling served as my not-so-friendly alarm clock. A man strong enough to keep our home intact, raised by a single mother and internment camp survivor. His childhood home one of the few constants of my childhood.

The crinkling of dry nori sheets rustling against one another as her ancient little hands slide a black sheet out of the vibrant blue and red plastic. The warm, sweet aroma of rice vinegar gently floating through the air of the tiny kitchen Dad grew up in, stocked full of Costco-sized packages of every possible item she could find on sale. Multiple fridges constantly overflowing with food, food and more food, drawers filled to the brim with dozens of scissors, elastic bands, and other miscellaneous items, and stacks and stacks of Lindt chocolate bars, all manifestations of a deep wound that never fully healed. Wrinkled hands clinging tightly to tradition and stability and familiarity to ensure that the world doesn’t tear her away from home the way hers was stolen when she was a child. Determination in her thin, dark almond eyes: the same focused eyes through which I see. The same eyes that damned her to be raised in a camp as her relatives overseas fought in opposition to her own country.



I sit silently with a stomach full of love, staring at the mountains, six timezones east of the place I so desperately had to leave. Thinking of the roots I tore from the earth in order to soar across the sky. A whirlwind of countries and faces later, I can’t help but think of home. A treasure I can’t let go of, no matter how far away I fly. Home lies deeply embedded in the muscle fibres of my beating heart. It flows through my arteries like oxygen, sustaining me with every breath. Home is who I am.

I am home.