Phosphorescence

by Julia Baird

SOMETIMES IT IS HARD to know if home is where you return to or where you start from. It is intangible things: people, not postcodes, and conversations, not couches. When you start from a place, with a friend, you will find you are bound not to the suburbs you grew up in but to the person or people you left with. And these skeins of friendship, knitted by billions of words over decades, bind, then act like kites, allowing us to soar while knowing we can return to talk to someone who will remind us we were not just fools with shaggy hair who danced marathons to escape monotony and restraint, but also women who were escaping strangulation; who will tell us that it’s okay to run, stumble, fall in love, cry, make mistakes, dye your hair red, want to write or want to be a full, equal, complicated human being, that’s it’s okay to dream of more. To want to ‘Get. The fuck. Out of here.’ And they will understand that what you might have been looking for was not another suburb, or even just an exit sign, but open skies. And that the impulse to run is the same as the impulse to run a clipping razor across your scalp: it’s an impulse for freedom. We shed hair in a bid to shed skin.