Home (S2E5)

Is where I want to be

(Rarely do I suggest pre-reading, but as some of you are new (hello!) a sister piece to this one might be S1E18 - Family history is written in blood.)

I can't tell one from another
Did I find you, or you find me?
There was a time before we were born
If someone asks, this where I'll be, where I'll be

- “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) by Talking Heads

1

Nothing changed after I got a neck tattoo. Did I expect things to? Well frankly, yes. Yes I did. Now, I don’t want to be judged for my tattoos, but I guess I also… don’t want to not be judged for my tattoos??? What’s that Oscar Wilde quote…

“There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

I have a lot of tattoos, but this one is on my neck. That’s just under my head! It feels impossible to miss. But here I am, a hummingbird perched on my collar bone, living the same life I was living before.

But I don’t get tattoos to be noticed. I get them to feel more at home in my body, the place where I live.

2

Oh, we are all here is what I thought, the “we” meaning people who look like me and “here” meaning Hawaii. Don’t get it twisted—I look about as Hawaiian as a giraffe on a surfboard. But for a two week period in 1994, I thought I’d come home.

I was visiting with my sister, being mistaken for a woman, taking other people’s luggage off the carousel, spending too much on food so we could have An Experience. I was 18 and she had just graduated from law school (or maybe that was the year after, 30 years eliminates all the finer details.)

If you’ve never been Hawaii is as beautiful as you’ve been lead to believe, or at least it was when I was there. Hikes up dormant volcanoes. Scooter rides to the entrance of a rain forest. Beaches that make you understand why people like beaches.

But the thing I remember the most are the TV ads.

They were the usual visual crapulence¹, and I can’t recall a single ad with any fidelity. I just remember the people. They all looked like me². I was amazed at the variety of Asian-adjacent faces firing out of the screen. Coming from Vancouver I was used to being surrounded by people like me, but this was a different level. These people were on the screen.

3

Where are you from can mean a lot of things, depending on who’s asking, and I’ve heard the spectrum ranging from Where do you live to Why do you look and sound the way you do. It doesn’t have to be anything more than curiosity, and I’d like to think it usually isn’t. Except, of course, when it really is.

Canada had already stopped feeling like home when the man in the shop told me I didn’t look Canadian. Still felt like the place I was from (factually accurate), but not a place I belonged. So when he said that, and I said have you been to Vancouver, and he said no, and I said a lot of people there look like me (which is both true and not remotely true), it only sort of tweaked my racist alarm.

Because a part of me was agreeing with him, a part of me was thinking this dumb bastard sees me in ways I am only now seeing myself. Canada is a beautiful country, one of the top places to be born, an undeniable boon to my life and a main ingredient in any success I’ve had.

And the minute I step out of the airport, I’m a stranger.

4

People change
But you know some people never do
You know when people change
They gain a peace, but they lose one too

- “Seasons (Waiting On You)” by Future Islands

When London stopped feeling like home we left.

No one ever says you don’t look like a Londoner, because even people who live in London have no idea what a Londoner looks like. In my nine years living there I met a handful of people who could truly claim to be from the city.

I left Vancouver because, in my words at the time, there wasn’t enough happening there. I didn’t like the person Vancouver seemed to want me to be.³ I thought I could be a different person in London.

And sure enough London is the place I started to be the person I (maybe) always was, and for that alone it remains one of the core places in my headcanon of Why Is Thom Like Thom And Not Some Other Person. And yet, it stopped feeling like home when I lost a sense of responsibility towards it. When I didn’t feel like I had any obligations.

5

It’s pouring rain and I’m driving in circles around Haarlem, looking for a parking spot so I can unload the two turntables (and a microphone) I’ve packed up for the event. The event is playing records at the closing weekend of a beautiful coffee spot. I have no connection to it other than I like the space and I like the owner. I also like playing records.

I can remember the moment Haarlem felt like home. I was at Le Station Service, a now-closed French deli that used to be a thrice-weekly haunt. I was buying another jar of fig jam to join the still half-full jar of fig jam in our fridge, and I thought It’s important to me these people are in a good place.

I used to feel this way in London, about people and places, but at some point it started to seem thin. Hard to maintain. Maybe it was Brexit, maybe it was another Tory government, maybe it was the sheer size of London and the drop of water in the ocean the single sand bag against the tide. Maybe I was just tired.

At least, that’s what I thought when we moved to Haarlem. Look, here’s a small lovely space to be tired in. And then I found the French deli. And the coffee spot where people gathered on Wednesdays. The coffee people knew the French deli people, and that connected to the other coffee spot and the other other coffee spot.

Slowly, through proximity and repetition, I learned about the lives of the people who call Haarlem home. Haarlem has a good percentage of sole-proprietor businesses, and many (all?) of those proprietors live in Haarlem. In this way, despite its aesthetic and steady flow of tourists, Haarlem doesn’t feel like a theme park.

The more I got to know people, the more responsibility I felt. Not so much to them, although that, in time, happened too. But to Haarlem. I want good things for Haarlem, and that’s how I know it’s my home.

I also think we’ll leave Haarlem in the next few years, and I don’t see this as a contradiction. Home isn’t a place, it’s a committment to a place. Not to stay, but to learn and try and give a damn.

I know this is a privilege and luxury but if you have the privilege and luxury and don’t care about the place where you currently live, have no sense of responsibility or obligations, move somewhere you do. It’ll feel like home.⁴

1. This doesn’t mean what you think it means unless you’re a linguistics nut.

2. Like a lithe, effortless version of me.

3. It turns out Vancouver didn’t want me to be anyone. But if you’ve ever noticed a kind of flattening of culture in an area, a persistent sameness to a vibe, you know what I’m talking about re: a place silently indicating how you should spec your character.

4. Recent events in the Netherlands has made it feel less like home for many vulnerable groups. Fuck fascists.