Coming home in August

On the going and the returning, endlessly

Suddenly it’s like I don’t remember how we got here, all these many months later. We’re opening the door and crossing the threshold into home—this moment that felt, just weeks ago, like it would never come. We shake our heads and wonder how it can feel like I never left. Everything is beautiful because it is familiar and known.

I remember the feeling of being a teen girl in the backseat of my parents’ car, on the way home, sun falling carelessly through the window. Head lolling, the sounds of my parents’ whispers in the front, my and my sisters’ fingers sticky from some sweet thing. I remember lying on the backseat in the August of our childhoods, sleepy from motion and joy. 

This is what it feels to come home. This is what crashes around in the narrow street of my chest, as I sit on the couch of this small Toronto apartment with the crooked blinds. All the things in the corners in which I left them, all the pages folded in the corners I know them to be folded.

It was hard, this year away. And there were moments of real, deep missing. I felt aloneness and all that it raises to the surface to be dealt with. But I will remember that I walked through it rather than around and for this I am grateful—for my clumsy willingness to trudge through, exercising this heart muscle, finding pockets of home along the way. New friendships caught and carried into tomorrow. Old ones appearing around the corner, turning see you soon to see you later. My people reminding me I am theirs even when I am far. And, of course, Mo making anywhere home. My anchor, even when I am adrift. 

August, itself, is a kind of coming home. The settling of summer. The deep, lung-filling breath before the close. The burrowing into porch chairs and returning the library books and closing the doors behind us, so as not to let the creatures in.

I am reminded that we all come home to ourselves, over and over, in our own small ways. I come home to Toronto—the streets I know and those I still learn. And I come home to myself by returning to that which makes me real, again and again—the people I love, the family I choose, the home I build with all that I gather along the way. This returning is the gift of my life.

I think of how we can go even where it is unknown and still arrive at where we belong. Isn’t it amazing? To go and then to be able to come back? We swim out to sea and still hear the sound of waves clapping against the shore, reminding us that land will be there when we return, just as it was.

I think of this as I unbox the things I accumulated this year, placing these items among my old ones. A grainy photograph of a new friend spooning raspberry compote onto the birthday cake she baked for my 26th. A stack of novels from the neighbourhood bookstore, the first place at which I became a regular. A pinch bowl holding a handful of bottle corks: the Chilean red from our anniversary, the Californian white from the night I signed the new contract, and the mushroom-shaped cork from the champagne of our engagement.

It is all new and it all belongs. It reminds me both that I left and that I will always come back. It reminds me that both can be true.

Mysteries, Yes by Mary Oliver

Outline by Rachel Cusk

Thank you, as always, for being here, right on time. It’s been another while since the last newsletter, so I’m extra grateful to you for being in this little corner of the world with me, whenever life allows.

I’m so happy you’re here. If you enjoyed this little love letter, I want to know! Shoot me a message on Instagram: @ramnasafeer. If you have another question or comment or sweetness to share, you can also email me ramnasafeer@gmail.com. Let’s chat!

I hope you stick around. Sending love and rest,

Ramna