This is what I have. This is what I do.
A blanket as soft as skin out of which I wake, leaving her behind as she murmurs. I open a drawer - eleven black T-shirts, two twilight-blue shorts. I shut the bedroom door like a whisper back to her.
On the dining table, a jar of Arabic dates, juicy right down to the seed. An exhausted bunch of flowers in a vase - curling roses, white Queen Anne's lace, rust-flecked marigolds.
The house is quiet, groggy, waiting for sleepy awakenings.
There are yellow bananas in a wicker basket on top of the fridge. I peel one. I open the window and look for traces of light in the dark lake outside. I know who's looking on from the mantel - a knitted straw squirrel, a stone-glass dog, a brass cat, a metal-stringed cow, a stone horse. Books rest on shelves, recovering from the exertion of their plots.
And, looking askance, a happy Ganesh in a burnished frame, approving of the home he presides over.
I use a shoehorn to put on my jogging shoes. I plug in my AirPods and catch Birdy just starting Quietly Yours. Yes, of course. Always.
.
Hear the prose poem here.
Hear Birdy in her utterly gorgeous “Quietly Yours”
Ara (who goes by the name petrichara on Instagram) writes "someone who allows you to rest is the relationship dynamic of all time".
And I think - it's not only people but places too.
Places we're familiar with, places which allow us to ease into ourselves. Like a home. Where we know everything, where everyone knows us, and all we have to be is what we are in our own skin.
And often when we move in our home with awareness, we find the new in the old, messages we hadn't got earlier, congruities we hadn't encountered before. We know our home's oddities to be our own, we find its nooks suffused with hidden histories, and it is our witness and sanctuary. A home is a friend, silently seeing us unwind or unravel with equal sang-froidness.
Familiar people, familiar places are a boon to our hearts, solace to our souls, as we step into the unfamiliarities of an unforgiving world. We start our days, unaware what it would bring, our guards up, a thin tensile strain keeping our spine straight. Are we funny, are we competent, have we met the world on its terms without losing ourselves, have we stamped it with our individualities?
The modern-day stress we keep hearing about is merely a result of these unmeasurable presences of a normal day.
When we step into our homes, leaving our shoes and artifices behind, it's the medicine, the panacea, the equaliser, which brings us back to our sanities.
We would be deranged without our homes.
We would be deranged without our homes.
If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the healing and beauty of homes -
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