Away From Home
Image credit: Terina Kaire
My social media has been saturated with Covid-19-related content. Headlines that document tragedies, tweets that downplay the seriousness of it all, and commentary from creative minds that have flourished in these moments of social distancing. It's all that seems to dominate my mind right now, whether I'm obsessing over the headlines or mentioning it in casual conversation.
I am exhausted by the constant repetition of doom and gloom. Although I am slowly becoming desensitised to the scope of the tragedies associated with this pandemic, I am aware that this is a privilege. There is a luxury in becoming desensitised to a tragedy that I know many cannot afford. Just as there is a luxury to stay home during this unprecedented pandemic.
I write this from my humble living room in Hilo, Hawai'i. A living room where the paint on the wall is chipped, the floors are scratched, and the couches have seen better days, and although there are far worse places to be to wait out this pandemic, it isn't home. Or a better way to describe it would be: this is not where I grew up, where my immediate family resides or is it home to some of the closest people in my life? It can be more accurately described as a place I have recently moved to in the last six months.
I have obsessed over the latest headlines from Aotearoa, refreshing my Facebook feed for updates, and I watch from across the moana the seemingly quick rise in diagnosed cases. Last night, I read the Emergency Alert at least a hundred times. Friends posted it as stories, statuses, and tweets, a reminder to stay safe and stay inside. A reminder that this is a time of rahui, a time to heal, a time to stop, a time to pause, a moment in time where we must take care of ourselves and our community.
It is a strange feeling to witness what is unfolding in Aotearoa, my home country / my first home, from a couch across the other side of the moana. A feeling I describe as a desperate longing to return home lodges itself in my throat; it weighs on my chest as I claw for a familiarity that has gone. A feeling that lends itself only to be described in flimsy metaphors, and yet I struggle to find the right words to capture what it is this feeling is.
The assumption I could always return home at any time has now been challenged. There is a desire, a call to return home that I cannot answer, and if I could, would I return? It's become easy to romanticise returning to the ancestral homeland when I can't easily find my way back there.
It's become easier to mourn home when headlines tell you that kiwi politicians prefer that you wait out this pandemic out where you are. As I grapple with this strange, newfound grief of not being able to return home, I am at least I am okay and healthy. It is more than perfectly okay that these reassurances do little to ease my troubled mind.
As I cycle through the five grief stages, I return to a reassuring thought: this too shall pass. I will return home, but for now, there is peace in this second home I have found in the moana.
