Returning is a journey that extends every way beyond

On my walk to get groceries, I pass by a small pond. I haven’t lived in this area very long, only since November, so this is my first spring here. I’ve been trying to walk more, to bike less - to slow down as everything speeds up. I’m often guilty of wishing things away when they get to be too much, so slowing down creates the space to notice. On my walk, I notice tadpoles. Or at least, I did. 

I first saw the tadpoles a month or so ago in that first flush of spring when winter, though over, still lived in the exhale. There were hundreds of them. Everywhere. I’ve always felt a kinship with amphibians. I (and my hair especially) need moisture. To see a blossoming of all of these tiny frog-to-bes, it gave me this feeling that everything would work out in time. 

Last week, when I went back to the pond, I couldn’t see a single tadpole. Strange. I’d been the week before and stood next to a bunch of kids and we had a nice bonding moment celebrating the tadpoles. This time though, after a heatwave that left as fast as it came, the kids were gone, the clouds were back, the tadpoles vanished. 

There are, according to the internet, a few things that can explain the sudden disappearance of a huge number of tadpoles: 1) Hiding. They could simply be out of view in the silt and plant matter. (Not feasible, I think, because there were so many and the pond is not that deep.) 2) Predation. (The pond, in an urban linear park, is actually pretty wild given its location. I think this is the most likely.) 3) Metamorphosis. (Supposedly, the tadpole to froglet stage can happen so quickly that it can seem like a sudden disappearance; did the sharp rise in temperature speed up their development? Another possibility, but one that seems less pausible.)

Whatever the cause for their disappearance, the absence of the tadpoles made me feel emptier than anything. I wanted to believe that they could be in new forms, their tender-baby skin sealing rudimentary gills, their freshly webbed limbs crawling through the grass, wiggling from a world of water to a world of earth, but I know that they are probably all gone. To see so many thrive and then suddenly go, it was too much. I wanted them to come back. It felt too soon to be without them - we still had so much more to be. 

𖦹𓆏𖦹

A few days before the tadpoles left, I saw the swifts come back. Every year, swifts make one of the longest migration journeys there is, travelling around 14,000 miles. You often hear them before you see them, screeching, then careening. Swifts are well known for living their lives on the wing, stopping only to nest, even sleeping as they fly. They leave South and equatorial Africa in January, fly over the Levant in February, sweep through Italy and France in March and April, and arrive in Southeast London at the start of May. They leave when they have bred in the autumn, when they begin their journey back to the River Congo and other warm, humid winter homes.

When I lived in Nunhead, I briefly got to know one swift. It was that baking hot summer - the summer that started in March or April. Back then, the Sun was so fierce it was roasting baby birds alive in their nests - so hot that they were jumping out even as the fall would kill them. I came across one in my front garden, grounded, too young to fly but not quite dead. 

After some back and forth, and a lot of freaking out about my ability to care for small, wounded things, the next day I was on a train to Kent to pass the bird (somehow still alive and clinging onto a tissue-lined bowl in a shoebox) over to an independent bird rehabber. The wildlife rescue centres were full and overwhelmed but, as luck would have it, there’s a whole network of migrant women obsessed with (and good at) rehabilitating wild birds and getting them to fly again.

I left the swiftlet in the hands of the rehabber who later texted me to say that the bird (who she called “Mrs Swifty Pants”) had been nursed back to good health. She (would the bird use she?) was prepared to fly to wherever her/their forebears had flown from within equatorial and Southern Africa. The following year, if all went well, the swift would return to where they were born in the eaves of their/my roof. Similar to a tadpole returning as a frog to their ancestral pond, the swift would, if given the circumstances for flourishing, live on to fulfil their stretch of an intergenerational circle - a life as a journey shared across a community. With the forward beat of their wings, they would stitch together the passing of continents, oceans, ancestors, compelled by a memory that both belonged to them and not. 

Except the swift didn’t. That autumn, my neigbour sealed over every nook of the roof and made it so that the swifts could never come back. I wonder where they went, where they go, now that their home has disappeared?

𖦹𓆏𖦹

The last time I was in Jakarta, many years ago now, I realised how much home is an immaterial, evolving, collective process. Generations of my family have lived on Jalan Assam Jawa - named for the tamarind trees that once grew there in abundance, now all gone. Though I grew up in the UK, I spent many summers on that street, like my mother and grandparents and great grandparents. My nenek once told me that, when she was a girl, she would see crocodiles in the river; my mother told me that, when she was a girl, she once saw a dead body. When I last went to the river, to the street where my family are from, I thought I would see ghosts. The great aunts and uncles that snuck me treats and bought me neon-blue Fanta had all passed on, the grown children all dispersed to other regions that don’t flood so much. For some reason, the street didn’t feel as empty as I thought it would. In fact, it almost felt normal. It was still busy, loud, happy, and all of this filled me with a very different, very particular, kind of sadness. 

As someone who moved around in my childhood, I learned to build homes in my heart through my stories, and to build temporary but beautiful homes in my relationships (all kinds). If home is a verb - a journeying and/or building - rather than a noun, what happens when that process is stopped? 

Fresh, personal griefs remind me that there are “clean” deaths and there are “bad” deaths, where “bad” amounts to a life where someone was unable to live their life in earnest. With a clean death, where death is tragic and hurts like hell but is a given, there is at least a sense of expansion - a possibility of burying grief as a seed and watering it so that it can grow into something nourishing. With bad death, where death is sudden and complicated and a million things are left unsaid and unresolved, it buries under the skin and must eventually be excavated by incision. People don’t need to die for there to be death; they can simply disappear. Maybe they’re across the ocean or maybe they’re in the same neighbourhood. Maybe it wasn’t them who left, but you. Either way, grief is home’s door through which we all move.  

Collective grief is what it means to look at a spider and see, as Fady Joudah’s daughter does, a being, alive, looking to make a home. Grieving is proof of living and living is a process of aging and moving through time, of coming undone. I remember that home is a place that must always be made, over and over, or else it too comes undone, and I remember that building is a privilege afforded to those of us able to enter physical and emotional homes with safety - who can access shelter, fresh food, fresh water, healthcare, joyful moments with friends and family; who have the freedom of movement to return to ancestral lands, and whose ancestral lands will be there for them when they do eventually return.

Because of this, I think building a home begins with the intention to support yourself and others. With this, for however long, home can be lived on the wing, in an inhospitable pond, in pockets, in moments, in gifted playlists and dropped-off groceries and staying open.

I think home is a return that goes out in every direction - an endless, looping journey back and forth, or an ongoing, reciprocal conversation from the personal to the collective, and from the tender to the bold. I think it means recognising that each of our lives are much bigger than our time on this planet - that our feelings, thoughts, and actions extend every way beyond our immediate circles.

Above all, home begins with walking through the door even if the lights are off and no one’s coming home; even if leaving means you don’t know where you’re going and if you’ll ever come back. 

𖦹𓆏𖦹

Coming home from the supermarket, I went to check if all of the tadpoles really were gone. They couldn’t be, I thought, it was too weird. I put my bags on top of the picnic table that, on bright days, the aunties sit at with their packed lunches and their flasks of tea, and I crouched right down by the water, nose so close to the pond that I could smell the funk of decay. 

Then, swishing out from underneath the fringed leaves of the pond weed, I saw just one.