Leaving to return

The things that are because of another.

The Swan, No. 1 (1915) | Hilma af Klint

I have become a tad obsessed with season changes. I find them romantic. I like the onset of spring when the cherry trees start to blossom, and the skies become bluer. I like when summer slowly changes into autumn and the leaves once again come apart from the trees, a dissociation both colourful and melancholic…

…one end from one beginning, old from new, hot from cold — the lines between becoming clearer.

Life is full of these sorts of dichotomies. Love and hate, life and death, peace and unrest, friends and enemies. A child born somewhere at the moment an old woman draws her last breath. A marriage made consummate against the mise-en-scène of Niagara falls while another couple signs their divorce papers and go away to grieve the end of something they once cherished. Yin and yang, light and dark, loss and gain.

Leaving and returning – neither can exist without the other.

I have left home only a few times in my life, every time the distance is farther than before, but never permanent. I like to leave because I like to return. Home is where you leave to return.

“Home is not a place” permeates art and lore. At various points in my life I have repeated this lore, even dared to believe it.

“Home is a feeling”

“Home is a state of being.”

“Home is where you feel safe.”

“Home is a sense of belonging.”

In an article by the Atlantic, home is put forward as a form of identity. Oftentimes when you meet a stranger, one of the first things they ask is “where are you from?” The reason, in spite of how much a person moves around or where they find themselves in the world, is that it tells something about them. I like to think of myself as a product of all the places where I am from, a stem of sorts, from where all my parts emerge – I can leave in autumn, and return in spring.

Home signifies permanence. It exists in the people we have come to know, or hope to meet in future. It exists in routines we have built and routes we have come to be familiar with over time. It exists in the memories we have collected throughout the course of our lives. It exists in both comfort and the discomfort we seek to escape from. It exists in the things we had, the things we have, and the things we want.

Home is abiding. It is the place you return to, even when the bricks that make up it’s foundation waste away and everything lays in ruin. It is the place where, in the words of Robert Frost, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Frost’s narrative poem The Death of a Hired Man follows a conversation between a couple, Mary and Warren, about Silas, an old unreliable farmhand who has returned to their home to seek shelter after years of being away and neglecting his responsibilities. The poem explores themes like compassion vs practicality, home and belonging — things that are because of the other.

Silas has returned to the couple’s farm in poor health — it’s the only home he knows. When he walked out on the couple during the harvest season, he abandoned his obligations, leaving them without a farmhand. Contractually, they are not obligated to take him in as he has returned after the harvest season, old and frail and of no real use to the couple.

Warren insists that Silas has been unreliable and undeserving of help. Mary argues that the farm is the closest thing that Silas has to a home, and asks her husband to be compassionate — He has come home to die, she says.

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they HAVE to take you in.” Warren said, emphasising that acceptance and belonging is an obligation only formed through blood ties. To which Mary retorts:

“I should have called it something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Warren’s definition implies that “home” is where forgiveness and amoral obligations reside — where, no matter how badly you have treated the people there, you can still always expect to be accepted back, arguing that Silas ought to go to his brother. Mary insists that they are obligated to accept Silas anyway, blood relation or not. Warren’s definition is cynical, Mary’s is a bit romantic, but both of them are right of course. Ultimately, Mary is able to convince Warren to at least go see Silas where he laid, but when he returns, he informs her Silas has passed away. Home, the place where you go to die.

The idea of home as place appeals to me because I know that I can always return, whether it is to my parents’ house in Nigeria (home: the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household) or to my apartment in England (home: a place of residence). The being, the safety, the acceptance, and the belonging, they all exist in the abidingness. Because, as sure as all the leaves that fall off in the autumn are going to return in the spring, you can just always return.

I think I like leaving so much because I am obsessed with the returning. One that exists because of the other.

In There’s Always This Year, Hanif Abdulraqib writes:

I love the homecoming because I have known what it is to leave. I have seen the city I love from the sky just as I have seen the city I love from the cracks in between metal bars. Cherish the homecoming, because you know what lasts forever and what does not.

On my birthday this year, I went back to Lagos after being away for two years. It was just as I had left it — the stench of the vile mixture of dirt, urine, and sewage boiled by the scorching heat of the sun; the loud sounds of blaring horns, cursing motorists, raging pedestrians, roadside peddlers — all so familiar. Home.

I thought about my first time in the city visiting my sister over the holidays. And then the next time, about 6 years ago when I left home, my parents’ house, to start out on my own. Wide eyed, scared, feeling lost and afraid, I contemplated running back straight into the airplane so the pilot could take me back home. My legs would not move though, so I waited, fixated until my friend spotted me. It was my 25th birthday and in more ways than one, that was a defining moment of my life’s journey. I could either move forward or go back, so I chose to move forward, even though at the time I wasn’t quite sure what that meant or if I was even moving at all.

I think about both visits as returning, both times with different agendas, but a return nonetheless. And everytime I left again, I would have changed. Yet, whenever I have to go there, they HAVE to take me in.

I often think about this passage from Abdulraqib on “the return”:

And so, it was never the leaving. I was born into an obsession with returns. Something or someone leaves you, but you'll get something or someone back. Sometimes it's an even exchange. You kiss a person goodbye when they go away for a few days, and they come back to you the same person they were when they left. Other times, you lose a part of your childhood and something harder grows in its place. But a return is a return.

The old me will always exist in the memories, and so the future me will exist in these moments. I have experienced loss so that I can appreciate gaining. I know sadness so that I can recognise joy on the day it returns. I understand grief and so on the days when it leaves me alone, I know to make the best of it. I know hatred and I know love – the things that are because of the other.

Home, to me, will always be a place. It could be physical, dynamic, tangible or metaphorical, but it is also abiding. Something connects us to them, so that when we leave, we can return, even if it fails to stay the same. It could be a place buried in memories past or a place that exists in a hopeful future. It exists in people, far or near, those we leave behind and those we are yet to meet. It exists in a love that stays forever, in living or in death, a love to which you can just always return, even if you only go there to die.