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  Oct 2014 Zanele Tlali
Alli Westerhoff
Leaving home is no longer exiting the address attached to my paperwork.
The walls that contain my childhood are a time capsule full of spoiled memories.
The bedroom where I prayed away scary monsters is now a skeleton of myself with transplanted hobby attempts by my mother.
The rearranging of furniture, the shifting of pictures, the emptiness of space and claustrophobic piles of clutter in the closets push me outside.
Outside, where the trees grew with me and kept me shaded while my imagination transformed the branches into jungles or utopian planets ruled by female playmobile.
My mother laments at the clutter and space we hoard while my father would be happy as long as his tools are untouched.
Leaving home is like entering into a comma, and every time I wake up I've lost another memory.
  Oct 2014 Zanele Tlali
Katelyn Enders
no one wants you when you're dying. i made friends with the moon so that i would never feel that 3 in the morning loneliness again. you are the only thing i love that doesn't hurt me. sometimes i wonder if you laugh when you leave me because you know that if love were a game, you would be winning. i feel like i'm on a plane about to crash, but i don't care because you're holding my hand. once upon a time you held me tight enough to leave bruises and now that you're gone, they're all i have left. i pace the upstairs of my house for 33 minutes like i'm looking for something that i lost, and in a sense i am. when i talk to you, i ask myself "what's the point" and i've been searching for an answer since before i can remember. you paint pictures onto the parts of my walls that are cracked and bruised. you're making it beautiful as you tear it down. i am a forest fire and you are a rainstorm, and i want you to put me out.
you're my home but you keep leaving.
  Oct 2014 Zanele Tlali
Sinai
I have no idea what home is for me anymore.

It's not the third house this year, with new housemates and a pile of bad memories on the shelves. I don't care about the twentyfive pairs of heels in my closet. I never feel content with travelling home.

It's not my mothers place, not since years. There's a mixture of scents in the air there. Fights and anxiety, depressions and stubborness. But I still come there all the time.

It's not even the place where we go camping, though the rocks feel like freedom and I feel far away from all *******.

I used to think it was in somebody else's arms, but I can no longer believe such.
  Oct 2014 Zanele Tlali
Kagami
I come here to be happy,
To find my place
And teach myself how to be
A true writer.

To me it seems
I try.
I try to speak,
Show myself,
Do what I am supposed to do here.
I am told to be myself,
There is no blending in.
And yet, it seems I have to.

No one cares. I cry
And they stare and walk past.
I had more support and reassurance
In the place where I was bullied and tormented
Daily.

And here,
Daily,
I am alone.
Cliques formed and I was, once again,
And outcast.
  Oct 2014 Zanele Tlali
Juhi Chavda
Take me back to the place
Where everything's okay.
Where a new day isn't a new illness.
And dealing with it does not mean
Losing every waking moment to insanity.
Where small problems
Are really just small problems
And not disguised as life long chains.
Where peace is just around the corner
And acceptance isn't an unattainable feat.
Where you can do ordinary tasks with ease,
And where death isn't such a tease.
Where your mother's hugs are
The only medicine you'd ever need.
Take me back home, take me home please.
  Oct 2014 Zanele Tlali
Moe
Turn left at this light and it'll take me home.
Take me home?
Home?
Where is home?
Home is no longer a place for me.
Home is in your arms, where I wish I could be.
just take me home.
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