Moving out, moving in, moving, move.
Home is all you’ve ever known, until it isn’t. Suddenly, all you’ve ever been immersed in becomes your ‘background’. A background: two-dimensional, placed behind you and framed carefully in an image… Only in this case, the framing is a memory. But memory is selective, and suddenly warmth radiates from behind the picture in ways it never did when it was reality.
For me, warmth suddenly comes from eating sat on the floor, smelling spices, seeing a lady with her phone perched in her hijab.
It comes from eating with my hands, from cobbled alleyways, narrow streets and kids dodging cars with their footballs.
Children’s scooters hitting your shins, pain creeping up your legs, and bruises your mum would painstakingly ask you about later.
Handing out snacks to my peers, smells of traditional perfumes, fresh cut grass in the morning and the sound of a handheld school bell.
From slightly dimmed rooms, the beep Kim Possible’s device makes and a certain stance women of an older age do where they place their hands on their hip.
Warmth comes from a distinct sound a certain bird makes that I’ve never seen, but forever awoken to.
A man selling fresh vegetables at ungentrified prices out of the back of his van, and the specific weight and coldness I feel in my hands when I hold a marble.
It comes from flowery laundry detergent, a clean house, raucous kids and library books.
From setting aside fivers for spending on something fun each time I go to the shops, from renting movies, building snowmen and golden dangly earrings.
The warmth becomes an anchor. Like the structure of the Earth’s layers: this warmth is my abstract core, captured behind me, while my feet remain firmly on the crust of my world.
But alongside the warmth lurks discomfort – unexpected, persistent, always in the background. Shadows that lurk when the sun shines its hardest. They belong specifically to my background, only existing in it. If these shadows are sinister, I am too.
These shadows get their strength from two identities eclipsing one another. They emerge when I jump after the sound of a man yelling, or when I’ve been shopping for a little too long, or every time I hear an Elliott Smith song.
They cast their shade when I feel a separation between communities sparked by arbitrary hate; when I hear the prime minister echo far right politician, Enoch Powell, when I’m reprimanded for my time keeping skills and when I’m asked a question in urdu… a language that never seems to find a way past the tip of my tongue.
The shadows cast a necessary shade, necessary as without them I wouldn’t be real. When drawing a complex landscape, shading is key. These shadows ensure the background that takes up space behind me is three-dimensional, somewhere I could drop into without suspicion.
And now, through some strange happenstance, finding my way has worked into a circle, pushing my background in front of me, making it my destination. The frame expands like an aspect ratio shift in the cinema, the screen enveloping the audience. The shadows are warm, I’m a primordial shape, and the background becomes the now – but now it’s almost sickly. Not the almost clinical warmth that radiated from behind, but complex and immersive, overwhelming in the way real life is, the way belonging is. The former present becomes the background. The magic only exists from afar.
Warmth now radiates from fancy coffee, philosophical books, lying on grass alone, a very very good sandwich and an even better call with an old friend.