#27 - Other Memories — CHRIS DA CANHA

In my dreams of home I’m by the back door, at night, flustered about how we haven’t properly locked up, thinking someone might get in. I cross over onto the patio, and back into the lounge, again and again, trying to keep watch and fussing about why isn’t the door being locked? If my dream casts me out of the house, I’m on this impossibly connected web of roads that always take me higher, but never over the hill to my bedroom where I can stop. There’s an anxious countenance to the scenes that paint my head at night, when the night takes me home.

Until December of 2022, I hadn’t been home in nearly 5 years. When I left South Africa, I was really leaving. Ending up back there would have meant I’d failed to catch the life I’d fantasized about living far away. Trying to piece together a life in Seoul during that time had drawn my attention from the slow burn of my parents aging in another country, but as I booked my tickets, home and what I’d find sleepwalked into focus.

I found that many of the things I’d left had become more aggressive versions of themselves: the greens of the suburbs more lush and vital, the wariness and weariness of crime and money ingrained. My parents’ sensitivities were no longer quirk but character. I seemed to myself somehow less South African (“You still have a normal accent, but, like, you speak more clearly.”) while everything around me was doubling down.

*“What a horrible picture of nothing.”* - Mom

This was the last time I’d be in my childhood home. My mom had sold after taking a bad fall, and was soon moving to live closer to my sister. I felt some pressure to document it, to make it beautiful for my memories, but so little of it fit right. It’s like the walls and the garden were uneasy playing a part for me so I could say, Here’s the evidence of all the happiness. How could somewhere this pretty be home to anything but a happy family?

My new memories couldn’t stand alone, without all I’d experienced there growing up. I photograph what is new to me, but when you go back home, the only thing that’s new is you. So I photographed what I remembered instead, all the things that were new to me once.

My razor, among my mom’s things. The first time I shaved, it was here too.

The far switch for the bathroom, the near for the passage. My fingers immediately went to the right one on my first night. I couldn’t remember where we keep the bowls.

The pink keychain to the key to my sister’s bedroom door. For some reason, always on the outside as if to lock something in. The room became mine after she moved away.

The curtain’s I’d peer through every time I walked past at night, in case someone was trying to get in.

The door to my mom’s room, where I’d hear her having nightmares after she and my dad got divorced.

I wonder sometimes, if I’d stayed, could I have helped my parents’ happiness? Could I have made them feel less threatened by the world? Probably not. I wasn’t ready for that challenge that young, so I left. I came by some of the tools I needed because I left, but now there’s not much use for them.

I haven’t dreamed of home since I’ve been back. Maybe, now that the house is in other hands, home to another family, maybe there’s been a kind of cosmic reset. Maybe instead of painting my nights with dreams, its too busy with other kids, making other memories.