Years ago, I fell to sleep and didn’t wake up for a long while.
My body was still, content to let Time hug us close. The bed was big, the room was white, and everything was sterile. I was small, so very small, and the colors of me bounced through the room like a tiny cacophony of light.
Everyone said I was bright, even when dimmed by life. They didn’t know I could hear them, but I absolutely could.
I could hear and feel everything, but I was invisible.
It was just as I always thought: if you shut your eyes hard enough or long enough, no one can see you.
They talked around my bed, sometimes pushing down on it, rattling the plastic veins that linked me to the beeping machines and bags of nutritional goodies.
I was present, but I was invisible. I was there, but I was also somewhere else.
In the moment between this world and the next, my mind spent just a few minutes, or perhaps a day, somewhere truly horrible– then it was gone, peeled away, pixel by pixel.
I reemerged in my querencia– the home of my soul.
I had been there before– just days before, when my eyes could flutter open and my toes could wiggle on command– but I had never seen it. It was as familiar to me as my own hands, even though I had never run my fingers over the worn spines of the books that lined the wall.
The furniture wasn’t the best in the world. It was bought in the 70′s perhaps, and not well-maintained. The carpet was the color of rust.
There were people there, too: my muses, aunties of my heart. I didn’t know them, but I knew them. I ran into the arms of the eldest and she hugged me close.
I was home.
I locked eyes with the youngest across the room, and her eyes were strong and bright.
I was safe.
They sat me down on the couch and smiled as I pressed my face into the cheap fabric and took a deep breath. Another woman came out of the next room, and with a quick nod to her sisters, sat down with me on the sofa. She was the middle muse, and though it makes very little sense to say, even in the midst of a story about a place that couldn’t possibly exist:
In her eyes, I saw tomorrow.
I don’t mean that I saw the future, or even my future, or even my immediate dreams.
I mean, I saw the tangible entity that was tomorrow. I saw a reflection of myself in her eyes.
She held my hand, and I knew that I’d live to see her in this world, too.
I stayed for days, but the sun never went away and she never let go of my hand. She explained every sound and every voice and asked me questions I had never considered before– some questions that I wouldn’t understand for years. Her sisters kept me connected to this world, gently explaining everything that was happening– every funny sound, or lack of sound, or medical diagnosis.
I was tucked in the triangle of their strength and it was safe, and wonderful, and made of all the feelings I sought or would ever seek.
Then, quite suddenly, before I could say goodbye, I was ripped from there and brought back to this world. I was achy, and my words were broken, and I was in mourning for rusted carpet and a bookshelf that glowed in the sun. For days, I couldn’t stop the tears, and everyone patted my hand and said it was okay, that it was all going to be okay.
It wasn’t.
Then one day, not long after, I watched helplessly from my bed as my younger brother put a fork in the room’s outlet. I panicked, my gut clenched– and in the moment of abject fear– I saw a twinkle of my brother and I, years later.
It was tomorrow. It was my middle muse.
In that moment, she wasn’t a physical being– but she was there, comforting me, smelling of safety and strength, reminding me that my querencia was always there for me, even if I never can physically go there again.
Her twinkling certainty reminded me that I’d always have a piece of that home with me, tucked away in the very next page of any story,
the very next sunrise,
and the very next possibility.
I was homesick, but when my brother — unharmed and apologetic– ran into my arms and wrapped his chubby arms around me for a hug, I knew I didn’t miss it enough.
I was already home.
Querencia refers to a metaphysical concept. In Spanish, it describes a place where one feels safe, a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn, a place where one feels at home. John Jeremiah Sullivan defines querencia as “an untranslatable Spanish word that means something like ‘the place where you are your most authentic self.’” It comes from the verb querer, which means to desire, to want. In bullfighting, when the bullfighter prepares for the kill that will end it, a bull may stake out turf—querencia—a place in the ring where he feels strong and safe.
- Wiki
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Of course, there were books in the home of my soul. I still don’t know what to make of the furniture. Do you know how your querencia looks?