Unbelonging

I think I’m more at home in transience than in places, in liminal spaces like airports and hotels, in traveling and unbeing than in the rooted notion of a country with borders and tags and specific requirements. I’m most at home at home, in my apartment that is almost a non-place in itself, made out of a strange collection of books and objects that could be found in many places, right in the margins of where Chile becomes the Venezuela I carry with me everywhere, a country that once existed and is now no more —replaced by a new place that carries the same name but that I don’t know anymore, a place where I don’t recognize myself as belonging—, in my apartment two blocks away from La Moneda but that once you cross the door is all arepas and Desorden Público, with me and my American YouTube channels and my Taylor Swift always streaming and my Chilean cat, rescued from the streets, so anxious about space and territory, so needy with her constant requirements of love being reaffirmed, just like me.

I think I might now be more at home in English than in Spanish, and that maybe it’s because Spanish runs too close to my wounded heart, touches places that still hurt so much, opens scars that are still not fully healed and that might never be. English is not mine and therefore it feels safer, because by now I’m used to unbelonging, to never fully fitting in, to borrowed places and stories and words and feelings that I put on like an orphaned lamb, maybe trying to disguise myself in order to not attract anyone’s attention, trying to camouflage to survive.

For many of the things I still need to tell, I have yet to find the words in Spanish. To tell the story of the time my home -not my physical home, my notion of home- was wrecked by men with automatic rifles who raided my building and took my neighbors; to tell the story of the time my home was pulled apart by the man who I thought would be my partner for the rest of my life; to tell the story of my bloody and troubled relationship with my own body, of my obsession with the relationship between the body and the self, of the many things my fiction has wanted to say and has come short over and over. But there is so much unsaid in what has been lent and borrowed between me and the world once and again: so many stolen words from foreign languages, from songs and poems, from the words that my friends have lent me to describe themselves and myself, the myriad of ways in which our experiences of the world cross over boundaries that suddenly disappear when we realize that their “habibi” is my “miamor” and that an empanada is an empanada is an empanada.

I think I’m most at home where I don’t belong, which by now might mean that I’m most at home anywhere, because I don’t think I will ever belong again in any place, because once you’re an immigrant you can never cease being an immigrant, even if you go back, because as Odysseus, we can never truly return home not only because home has changed, but because we ourselves have changed and are now “part of all we have met”.