Of home as self

I trace you

as I erase you

I am dispersed

your confidence puzzles me

and I’ve refused to think about you

as you are tension

you smoke a lot

you are alone

and you wait

your lack of words

disappears

in the night’s stillness

not surprising me

you insist

you are the flight

you flicker

in the absence that contains you

you are movement

like a slow, and deep

stretch in a plane’s bathroom

you are a bit aloof

drifting by sensing

you reach out

you are process, adventure, journey

always there

you live fully

like siblings

fighting on a couch

throes of a magic high

you drive into me

you surround me

on the rim

you move away

ships in the night

you and I

you are not ashamed

of your desire

for sex

for language

for geographies to merge

to cross over

you are warm

you are I

singular multiple

home as self

home as w-hole

~

This creative piece is the result of a collective writing process. It was written as a letter to home—and a portrait—as I came to think of home as an interior space. Home as being within ourselves. Not a feeling. Not an architecture or a place. Home as something in motion and plural. How to write about it then, to be true to myself? It would mean moving beyond binary structures of thought, and a process of writing that challenges a singular point of view. Therefore—and inspired by David Carlin’s piece Essaying as method: Risky accounts and composing collectives (TEXT Vol.2 N.1, 2018)—I embarked on an exercise of collective writing. Carlin argues for writing as a tool for recomposing the world through cooperative processes—such as workshops—and presents a method for collective writing that embraces not knowing, fragments and risks, and that follows ideas of attunement, uncertainty and vulnerability. Based on his principles I created my own rules. I asked lovers and friends to send me texts, poems or notes giving a personal account of myself in order to write a collective portrait. I collected textual responses that I used as my own material, as preliminary notes and atmospheres for my writing. To this, I added my notes from Jean-Luc Hennig’s Bi (Gallimard, 1997), a book about bisexuality from a man’s perspective. Of Self as Home is the result of this process. Thank you to my contributors, and to Josephine Mead for inviting me to respond to the place one lives.,