Freedom

Freedom tastes like sourdough bread from the farmers market, still warm; an ice cold glass of moscato; feta cheese, grape tomatoes, and basil that was grown from your own garden...

Freedom smells like a cranberry chutney candle; freshly mown grass in the warm spring air, your own warm skin in the middle of the night...

Freedom feels like waking up slowly before the alarm; the first hot shower after a camping trip; crisp clean sheets after a long day...

Freedom sounds like a million peepers on a summer night; an amateur street guitarist; the cadence of saying "yes" whenever you want to; the air on your skin...

Tell Me Who I Am

Two years ago - floating, flailing, failing... Who am I? Where do I belong? Alone, orphan, single, abandoned, struggling...

One year ago - in the middle of cousins and aunties and uncles, surrounded, enveloped, drowned in love, people with the same eyes, same nose, same tilted mouth, the lilt of accent that sounded like home to my ears...

Today - lonely, longing, afraid, insecure, settled in mind yet unsettled in soul, searching and aching, reaching out and pulling back and tethered to the shore of conformity...

And what to do? Stay and be in the safety of misery? Run to the unknown yet familial comfort? 

Can you ever really go home again?

I think not...but I wonder, what else is there to do?