Final Resting Place

Written by Kyra Lee

To my home– to the hollow in my heart,

Simply put, I love you. I think I have always loved you, far before I ever learned what love was, even as I find myself learning day by day that what I once thought of “love” has more to do with safety than it ever did with love.

For you I hold the sort of adoration that oozes into the aching crevasses between bone and sinew, makes a home like weeds anchored deep in the sidewalk. For you I learn to find some sort of familiarity in towering, brutalist concrete landscapes, to look at your sterile facades and say, “This is home. I am home.” The bloody remains of my lungs hang from the branches like bunting, crimson-red and breathless. My heart is buried somewhere in a park, within the sandbox below your quivering rain trees, soon to be demolished to make way for cycling paths, signboards, trash cans—things that are newfangled and practical but never mine.

You have never belonged to me, but I have known I belong to you before I ever learned to belong to myself. One day, I will die in your cold, metallic arms. One day, I will be churned into dust to live in the bones of this city. Did you know they say that home is the first place you ever learn to run from? Did you know I will spend the rest of my life trying to get as far away as possible, to force the memory of my first home and final resting place out of my mind?