Maybe it’s because my name never had a home, a culture, a story in which to rest, that I seek out narratives like I seek black-inked fine-tipped pens: compulsively. Maybe my dark places just need their own language in which to confess the simmer and scratch of nibs on parchment, on velum, on cotton, on wood.
This is how my body sought to become paper, this is how blades sought to become pens. There is no canvas greater than the back. No skin or hide or substance that seeks pigment, marking, branding, scarring like the epidermis, layered, regenerating so often one must lay the ink deep for it to stick.
Like the dark, the ink runs deep in me. The doom of the millennium is nothing compared to what lies within, those secrets of shame and pain and homelessness we all refuse to share, or even see.
You’ll always have a home here…I hate to be cliche, but home is where the heart is, and your heart will always, always know the sea and the mountains as they were, as they are, as they will be.
Never forget.