I finally found home....and now I'm leaving?

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“I have a home I can return to, the land that knows me by all my names… I fall back to Earth, the same clay that raised me, and I dig up its red… I see that home wasn't out there, it was buried deep down here.”

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hi my dears,

I write to you back in Atlanta, back in town for playlists, parties, celebrations, showcases, and of course! friends ❤︎

in the last two weeks I shared in two big ways, I hosted a playlist poem / midnight mixtape (name in flux, but i like alliteration) at Sound Sanctuary and tabled Mournful Designs at a zine fair! both went beyond incredible and I’m excited to share back more reflections and photos from them soon!

in the meantime I wanted to share something I’ve had drafted for almost two months!! on august 18th, sun-soaking in the pool, I wrote a journal entry that felt deeply profound. It offered resolution, but not the kind of resolution that ends, the resolution that begins. In sitting with my own reflection, both my light and my shadow, I find myself resolved to venture deeper into the work of grief and mourning. For myself, more so, for us. In the last two weeks too I have felt so encouraged in my practice(s). I feel shy to say it, but I really do believe in what I am doing and I cherish this email space and community of dear ones as a place to archive what I am doing as I practice (and find its many shapes).

Anyways, I offer a read aloud and video collage from August, my last month in Atlanta before I moved to New York.

more soon,
Raya

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 At the end of August, I packed up my car with all my things and I drove up the coast to move to New York. Along the way, I solo camped in the forest of South Carolina, taking my time to say goodbye to a southern summer. Alone, dappled in sunset shine, I revisited the words I had written in my journal of seeming resolution and definite gratitude, words I had written as summer began to sunset in Atlanta.

August 18th, I wrote:

"I'm half dipped in the pool. Actually, more like seventy-five percent. I'm standing, leaning on the pool edge, notebook on towel, sun on my back. Earlier, I declared I would enjoy all the amenities, so here we are, soaking in Georgia summer sun. This is my own Brazil. Sometimes I don't have to fly all that way to enjoy the amenities.

In New York, I will have different amenities. Parks to sit in, wine bars to read in, people to watch. Now, I can't wait to go. Can't wait to go beautiful places alone and read and write. In many ways, I look forward to being alone in New York. That beginning when no one knows I'm there but my close friends.

I'll explore as the stranger, arrive as the plus one. For all the shit I write about being a tourist, I really do love to be a guest. And also I love to be a host and to have a home, and I'm so excited to have a place to put my stuff. To have my own bed again, to touch my things, to have agency over how my surroundings feel. I will cherish that.

And also I will go about it differently this time. I will not rush to fill the empty space, invest in the home I leave only eight months later. How much money have I spent on Facebook Marketplace and thrift stores on homes I barely stayed a calendar year?

I will start slow. Live bare.

On August 18th, dipped in the pool in Atlanta summer sun, I found home. When all the astrology says things will shift in my home and family life, I wonder if it's this. Me practicing being myself here, with her, with my cousins, with Sanctuary, with my friends. Maybe I was putting home prematurely in this vision of what could be when I already have roots here, in friends, in family, in the land.

And that's the real alchemy, real communing with ghost work that I've been doing over the last two and a half years here. I've made home here. I've made community here, and I don't want to leave that.

This poses a new challenge to me that I'm excited to take on. After I go, how do I stay connected not only with the people, but with the place itself, the land itself? I want to carry Atlanta with me wherever I go, and I wanna carry where I go back to Atlanta.

I'm satisfied with this place as my roots, as my home even if it's not where my house is, for now. It's like I reflected at the beginning of summer: some of that character-defining grief for home isn't as present. I think I've found some of what I long for here: a place to come from. Being here as an adult, I see so clearly how I do, come from here. For better or for worse, I see how this place shaped and informed me, how the culture of it created my baselines and my norms.

I feel that comfort and familiarity in it when I return. Even the parts I reject and denounce, even the parts I outgrew, there is still a bit of home in that too.

I found home finally. Not ‘final’ly.

And it wasn't that hard. It just took hard work.

I found home right where I left it, packed in a box by someone else because I left in such a rush the first time. Parts missing because I didn't know then what I'd miss now, what I'd wish I'd kept. But in the punch card, painted in bits by the holes is a portrait of me, who I was and who I am, and all the choices that connect the two mirrors.

I have a home I can return to, the land that knows me by all my names, the trails I can follow by heart.

And finding home actually makes it easier to leave 'cause I'm no longer seeking, casting her name on another. I carry her portrait in my wallet and in different languages sing her names to the water. Atlanta, Atlantis, Atlantic.

Uh-oh, here comes another deep dive. Researching Atlanta, epistemology, history, conspiracy. Atlanta is so blatant, so what it is. It makes me laugh, and it makes me grieve. And that bittersweetness is just the flavor I was dealt. I no longer judge it, no longer reject what I am.

I'm a middle-class, mixed American Black girl from the northeast suburbs of Atlanta. I was raised by two moms, mother and grandmother, and an army of aunts. I was raised in Black and educated in white. I studied the binary, promised a code to freedom. But really, all it got me was survival, which I cherish too, hold and remember with gratitude.

But I left and traveled and learned a spectrum of color that allowed me to want for more.

I fall back to Earth, the same clay that raised me, and I dig up its red. I pull out the boxes, trace the photos, and paint new portraits in gray, browns, and violets. See that home wasn't out there, it was buried deep down here.

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Part of me reads this and sees the beauty. Another says, "Who cares about another mixed American girl finding home in diaspora?" But also, that is a valid experience for me to have and express without proclaiming it as the experience we should center. And also, it is necessary for us, all, to each do our work, to do our undoing, so we can make our becoming.

Me doing this work shapes how I show up, how I travel, how my feet land on other lands, how I speak, how I hold new language on my tongue, how I love, how I relate, how I practice in my closest relations, how I get more clear about my responsibility to you, to me, to us, to this land, to this Earth. So I will continue practicing, continue expressing my grief, even as I acknowledge the positions of my grievances and the burdens I do not bear.

I do believe truthfully that it is by doing so, being honest about my grief, where it sits in me and where I sit in it, that I can best constellate my experience with yours and theirs, and that if you do the same, then we can truly meet and talk about how we can dream together beyond..."