It hit me the other day. Homesickness.

I had expected homesickness to feel like I'd been stranded, but it was different. I wasn't a poor soul marooned on a lone island. I was a soul, a heart, a mind, without a body. Seeing. Listening. Feeling. "And voices are / In the wind's singing / More distant and more solemn / Than a fading star."

More distant and more solemn than a fading star.

I felt disembodied. I walked the streets in a daze, nothing felt real anymore. I looked around me and my eyes passed unseeingly over the canals, streets, shop fronts, disregarding the fruit vendors and the old ladies offered up copies of a free local newspaper. I felt that if I reached my hand out I would be able to pick a hole in the fabric of the world around me, tear it open, and somewhere underneath that fabric was reality. Somewhere in there, underneath that fabric, was home. But not here, not in the rusty dollhouse homes all around me.

We had a four day weekend, but given this odd daze that came over me, I was determined not to let myself go. I knew I didn't want to stay home, but where else was there for me to go? Where are the beautiful, quiet bookshops? Where are the busy coffeeshops that serve rocket fuel and a smile, for only $2.75? Where is my favourite Puerto Rican restaurant, my Sunday morning stroll through the farmer's market with my mother and brother?

Where is home?

It was here the whole time. I just had to stare into the dark studio, breathe in the smell of the linoleum, the sweat; feel the tingle of excitement and nerves; hear the radiator crackle, and the soft sounds of a piano student practicing Debussy in the distance.

I walked into the studio and sat with the darkness and my silence for a few days; practicing my variations, agonising over my technique, fighting my body and losing as many times as I won. Then I found that I didn't feel so alone anymore.

Feb 13, 2020

Sharon Tate for Stone Tulips, Los Angeles

It was August 9th, 1969. The heatwave of the past three days had finally broken, but a dazed silence hovered in Benedict Canyon. The residents floated languorously in their pools, or hid in their houses from the relentless sun. There was talk of wildfires, expected to break out across Beverly Hills any day. Later, one of the killers would remark that “you could almost hear the sound of ice rattling in cocktail shakers in the homes way down the canyon”. The events of that evening, which took place at 10050 Cielo Drive, were to become one of the most publicized killings in American history.