On belonging

Creativity needs inspiration. Without the warmth of inspiration to melt it, creativity drapes itself with a dense winter fog that refuses to shed. Writing, if I may take the liberty of assuming that’s what I do, needs to have a catalyst with which to mould the clay of errant thoughts that would otherwise be lost in the graveyard of unspoken and unwritten reflections.

I was going through some of my writing, and I discovered that almost none of them had a location. They were all just smoky, fluid manifestations of my consciousness with no anchorage to a space on the map of this world. Most of my pieces did not mention a world outside of my house. In discovering this I realised how much I had internalised my dislike for the town I have been living in for almost 13 years now. I realised how detached my inspiration was from this patch of Earth I have spent most of my life in.

Writers often find a muse in the landscape of their city; they write poems, essays, entire books fuelled with their love for its history, its culture, its eccentricity. When I want to write, I shut all my windows and close all the drapes. I suspend myself in the space shuttle of my room, and my words and I float in its zero-gravity until I have gathered them all in my palms, and that is when, clutching them against my chest, I descend to Earth. My spatial existence is forgotten; in those hours of writing, I live only in time. When I create something, I try to rid myself of this town. I try to rid myself of it because I see nothing worth keeping. There is no beautiful garden with a favourite tree I can go and sit under, no public library that made me fall in love with books, or even a single bookstore for me to find solace in. There is no bench a famous writer once wrote a masterpiece on, no famous origin story, or any story at all. There are no fond memories of places in this town that mark the milestones of my life. This town just is; it exists, that is all it does. It is just another town in a multitude of them with no personality to call its own, as if it were mass-produced with a product description that read, “Town. Pre-fitted with roads, buildings, trees and dust.” The buyers added the DIY creations of cow poop and environmentally harmful garbage all on their own.
If historians were to examine this town’s ruins some hundred years later, they wouldn’t find the remains of a lost culture; in fact, they wouldn’t find anything that would tell them that this town was a town of its own. How scary it is never to stand out, to only exist and not live, to have been just another star in the vast expanse of the universe.

I think these feelings were exacerbated by the pandemic, like the already shattered mortar of a pothole that is not repaired and keeps on breaking with each passing vehicle until it is big enough to cause fatal accidents. The pandemic made me realise how little of my personality was shaped by this town, how all that I have learnt has been taught to me far away from this town. When people say they belong to a certain place, they mean that they carry within themselves a part of it. They mean that they have a place in the overwhelming vastness of this world to call their own; they mean that their is a place in this world where they can go back to, tired and needy, and be sure that they will be tended to, because they belong to, they belong in their town. Me? I simply don’t belong to this town. I don’t belong to its mundaneness; I don’t belong to its unimaginative creations; I don’t belong to its leaves; I don’t belong to the wood of its trees; I don’t belong to the wind of its breath.

Not belonging to the place I grew up in, not carrying a piece of it with myself makes me sad. I want to belong to it, I want to belong in it, I want it to inspire me, I want it to change; but thinking of this town gives me an inescapable urge to break free, to forget that I ever called this place home and see a world in which this town is just a ghost in my memory. My mom once said to me, “I think that our dislike for someone is often a manifestation of our own fear of becoming what we dislike.” Maybe that is what flows through the veins of my dislike for this town, projected fear.