Assignment:

Write a short story (600 – 1000 words max) that describes your sense of home and the values and stories that you use to connect yourself to your home.

My story:

     Who am I? she’d ask. She’d sit in darkness, waiting for space to solidify around her, but there was none. Who am I? she’d cry, wishing desperately for an answer. She was cold and it seemed like nothing would ever come to warm her.

     Then something would hit her, flying out of the pages of a book straight into her soul, and she’d know where she belonged. This place was familiar; it reeked of childhood and familiarity. It was what she’d grown up on. It was home.

     Or was it? Safely hidden between the pages of a book, she could be at home, but when she put the book down and wandered onto the street, she’d be a stranger. At 11, it had been home, but now she had an accent; she could no longer belong.

     Home. Alas, it could not be home.

     Darkness folded in around her, wrapping her in its empty arms. You and I are the same, it seemed to say: we don’t belong.

     But then a song would reach her ears, a familiar tune from her teenagedhood, a reminder of a history that gave her a sense of home. She’d start to sing, start to feel ground solidifying beneath her, but like the book, the song too would fade. She could sing it loudly and proudly, but there would be another and another, until one came on that wasn’t familiar. This was a tradition she’d been dropped into then plucked out of. It was not a place in which she would ever find belonging. It would never envelop her in the way the darkness did.

     And the darkness would come again, curling around her fingers and gently caressing her back. It would whisper things in her ear, tell her that she would never be at home in the light. You’re an international bastard*, it’d tell her: you only belong in that you don’t.

     She’d begin to believe it, begin to curl up in the darkness, but then she’d hear a voice, a voice telling tales of the past, and she’d know that she belongs. Her parents, her grandparents, they had history, if only she could find it. But over top of that voice would come another, the voice of reason, a monotone drawl telling her that those links were severed, that she could never belong to a land she’d never been to. Citizenship, yes; home, no.

     She belonged nowhere. Only the void would embrace her. She could move between countries and literatures and languages, but she could never wholly belong to any of them. An international bastard, she existed in the space between them: belonging, but not belonging.

     Who am I? she’d ask herself. The answers never ceased to come, but they came from all directions, at ends with one another. She’d been raised to value difference, to accept all, but she’d never learnt where to place herself. The harder she searched for a place of belonging, the further she divided herself, until no place of belonging was ever to be found. She could only belong in that she could not belong. For her, home was a notion she couldn’t define.

     Even as her childhood bedroom began to solidify around her, she knew that it was no longer home. Home had changed; ‘home’ was ever changing.

*I borrowed the term “international bastards” from Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient: “Kip and I are both international bastards – born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back or to get away from our homelands all our lives” (176). Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1992. Print.

© 2015 Heather Josephine Pue

Works Cited:

Les Enfoirés. « Qui a le droit. » « Garou, Zazie, Isabelle Boulay, Corneille, Patrick Bruel et Jean Baptiste Maunier Qui a le droit Les Enfoires 2005. » Youtube. 13 May 2010. Web. 31 Jan. 2015.

Marchetta, Melina. « Extract: On the Jellicoe Road. » Penguin Books Australia. Penguin Books Australia. Web. 31 Jan. 2015.