Returning Home
- Mar 24, 2023
- 3 min read
by Nadia Gerassimenko
After Returnal
Prologue
Where am I? What is this haunting house? Why is it here? How are there so many me not me, all perished? More questions return to me, unanswered. More answers I seek as I return again. A part of me is missing /in/ me here. It summons in a twisted warble. An astronaut goes everywhere I go, never letting go.
I.
Help is far from on its way. I must help myself, for me, for me before me. This land is foreign, feral. It is ancient, somehow advanced, ageless — a radical marvel. So blue, so beautiful. Like something primeval, sadly rooted in my gut. The terrain, it transforms, transcends, reconfiguring itself. It beats me every time before I could build up myself. Ten times it takes me. But one of me survives.
II.
Emerging into a landscape more torrid, I see a shadow of a figure pointing up. I glimpse away and back, it is gone. Everything is crimson here, even the wind howls red. The creatures are unforgiving, guarding something olden and sacred. I must get upward, whatever it takes. The trail leads to answers, I hope. I grapple and fight, cycles passing. Before I get my wingspan, I fall again.
III.
Lately I do not know when I am. Time is neither present nor has it passed. It returns like a blur, like how I am becoming — a sliver of me of me of me. Everything is broken here, malformed, mechanical. Only the all-seeing tree lives, stuck in a loop, red laser ready. I must fly past it, to the tower inferno, where answers plead for their escape. How close I get only to wake up into a dream.
IV.
I am here again. Where the beginning ended the crash. The site of returnal. Somehow it is different — a wildflower weeding everywhere. It does not want me to seek, to know. To follow my crying hunger, an empty that may never fill. A requiem plays all warped. It wants me to forget remembering. I cannot let it. I must rise to fall, and fall to rise again.
V.
Once upon a time I had hope. Hope lost meaning when I died and lived the same day to infinity. Am I even me anymore? Or am I just a brain-dead automaton following the only programmed script I have ever known? This biome gave up too, frozen and wasted. And yet, the pool of unknowns shivers with life. It teases me, and I cannot help but sink.
VI.
Submerging until I reach the abyss, I drop akimbo. I am ready to be tested to find my truth. How many times I have fallen. How many me I have seen faltered. How many false hopes I have followed. It is for them as much as it is for me. This void must me filled. I free myself and look into its eye knowing. I see everything.
Epilogue
I know now, and I do not know. The truth is ever elusive. All I feel is a loss, a longing. Love lost lost love. I hear its whisper echoing. Between ruins, through cracks, in beasts’ bellows and ancient ciphers. The closer I get, it disappears. But, I will never stop reaching for his hand /for home/. It is better to drive with purpose than be an empty white shadow.
Nadia Gerassimenko is a Web Copy Quality Auditor at The HOTH, freelancer in editing services, writer, and visual artist. Nadia has poetry, fiction, and essays published in various magazines such as Luna Luna Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Mighty, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Yes Poetry, Quail Bell Magazine, RESURRECTION Mag, The Hellebore, among others. You can read more by her on Substack: https://whenhopewrites.substack.com/.
