Road Diary 05/02/23 - London, ON
Spin spin spin spin spin. Get sick, slow down, don’t go anywhere for days. Time warps, stretches and deflates. The light passes through the house over and over, from the kitchen at the back in the morning, to our bedroom in the afternoon. It is midday, and I worry about a loss of momentum. Many of the books on the shelf have not yet been read, and while I like to hang out on the precipice where it could all start in an instant, I must remind myself that truthfully that sort of progress is only actually made by slowing the pace back to a viscous malcontent and discomfort, the focus of actually reading. I do not read.
Instead, disappear for a week in a room full of memories. Laugh and cry and cry through laughter. Diasporic nostalgia for all of us who have loved here. Every one of us from a different city, calling out to another place, willing it to be home.
There’s a science to the strategic value of what we remember, and randomness to the emotional implications of what sticks. Here is where we once longed for renewal, there is where we sat side by side on the bed asking for help finding a different future, this is the window I leaned out of for 14 days of lockdown reaching for sunlight, that is the plant grown from clippings from a friend. This is the photograph of us from your niece’s wedding. Here is the space that is still (and once again) home.
