Excerpt from The White Moth

When I was very little, so little I now only have soft, faded, misted memories of that time, like looking at them through a very old warped glass bottle – when I was little, I would sit on the floor in the silence that surrounded me whilst my mother read a newspaper, and tell her “I want to go home”. “You are home”, she would say. “Yes,” I replied, “but, I want to go home”.

Because a home is not just a house; it is not always material, it is not always bricks and mortar. Home is sometimes simply the place where you belong. It is the place your soul yearns for. It is the feeling of warm sunshine on your back whilst you sit on soft, freshly mown lawns with birds tweeting in the background and a soft breeze gently stroking your arm and forehead; soft, fluffy, feather light clouds above you drifting like dandelion seeds across the endless blue.

Home; it could be within a group of people, it could be on the other side of the planet in a place you have never lived before and so far removed from the place you were born – and yet you may find yourself feeling more at home than you ever did in your own home town. Because sometimes home is something only for the peace of the soul; not where your sofa and bed are, or where your mail gets delivered.

And it was that home I searched for, for years before, and for years afterwards. I moved to so many different towns, lived with so many different people, and every time I would never find myself satisfied, and so before long I would be packing my bags again. And I still search; although now, I know I will never go back, I will never find it. The home I seek is behind me; it is the town barely in view still from the window of the departed train, fading further from view with each turn of the wheel, each breath, each year. There is no way back, only the sentence of constant travel further away from it.

And then there is him. The times I have cried out loud for him and he does not come; and mysteriously, those times when I do not, my sleep is flooded with him. Do I know who he is? Or is he just a face to whom I attach the character of a person tailor-made to fit the home-sick spirit which stirs, like an unborn child, in my belly. We sit and we talk sometimes throughout those nights where he chooses to visit. Sometimes we don't talk; sometimes there is no need. And so then, on afternoons where I have little cause for anything else, sometimes I sit and remember little things. Like the way his lips would feel when he kissed my neck; the softness of them against my skin, and then, the feeling of his gentle breath causing that delicious sensation to start as a tingle that trickled down and across my shoulder blades like tiny electric currents, growing into an overwhelming shivering stroke down my spine and culminating in a deep intense aching for him that caused warmth and want in places that only a lover knows.

One day, when my hair is faded and my skin has turned to crumpled paper, and the reflection in the mirror day by day grows all the more unlike the faded photographs of me in some dusty album; there will come a time when I will be able to go home, and after the darkness, I will open my eyes again, and I will be standing on a bright platform, the sun warm on my back. And when the last train departs the station on the long journey back; when I start to catch sight of it, excitedly, in the distance, every turn of the wheel taking me back to where I belong; the breath will rise in me, my heart will swell.

And there on the empty platform at the end of the line, I will see the figure of a man. I will finally feel strong arms around me, and I will smell the old familiar warmth of his skin as I nuzzle into his neck, and I will taste the sweet warm tears that will roll down my cheeks and over my lips. At last, it will be final. I will not have to wake up in an empty room alone afterwards willing myself back to sleep in order to live some more of that precious pretence.

And the mourners will come, but there should be no tears. Let them fly banners and sing on that day; that wonderful day when finally, she has returned to the place she belonged.

Welcome home.